Life after Paradise
by chai4anne
Summary: Six months after her vacation in paradise with Josh, Donna talks to her therapist.
1. Chapter 1

Life after Paradise

by Chai

Author's Notes: This was first posted on JDFF in September 2007, as a quite-seriously-belated post-ep for "Transition." There had, at that point, been a lot of post-eps for that episode, and I undoubtedly owed something to everything I'd read. But I was conscious as I was writing that I owed even more than usual to a few stories in particular: the episodes about Colin Ayres' gallery show in the Fantasy Virtual Season Eight (Shelley's "Pure and Useful Living" and Jen Wilson's "Rain") and Sally Reeve's "Unspoken."

Sally's idea that Josh and Donna might not have spent as much of that tropical vacation as they should have actually talking about their relationship and working out its kinks was one starting-point for me; her inspired thought that Colin might have asked Donna to write text to accompany his pictures in a gallery show was another; and I realized to my chagrin when I re-read her story some time after first posting this that I had echoed her more closely than I had intended in other ways as well. So if you feel as you read this that parts of it seem less than original, I'm afraid you're right. If you still want to keep reading, think of this, as I did as I was writing it, as a response of sorts to her story and Jen's, one that imagines a series of events quite similar in some ways to the ones Sally and Jen described, but I hope quite different, too, in others.

I'm also indebted to Aim for thoughts about Josh and Donna that she expressed while writing "Forgive Us Our Trespasses," and to Liz and Mistletoe for all their encouragement and help: Liz in particular researched many points for me, and both of them read it over and urged me to keep going whenever I was ready to quit. Without them this would never have been written, and it's a much better story than it would have been without their input, but its faults are, of course, entirely my own.

Life after Paradise

Part 1—

"Hello, Donna."

Louisa D'Amato smiled with professional welcome at her visitor, who was folding up her umbrella and balancing it awkwardly in the corner behind the coat-rack, trying to find a way to keep it from leaving a wet mark on the wall.

The woman turned towards her and tried to smile in return.

"Hello, Louisa. How are you?"

"I'm fine, thank you, Donna. How are _you_?"

The slim blonde made her way to the chair facing Louisa's desk. She was slimmer than ever, Louisa noticed: thin, in fact. Thin enough to look as though she might break when she bent at the waist to sit down—though, to Louisa's mind, she'd never been far from looking that way, anyway. She'd lost weight—not a lot of weight, but then, she hadn't had any she could afford to lose. Her cheekbones stood out painfully in her white face, and her eyes looked dark and shadowed. Loss of appetite, lack of sleep—Louisa ticked the symptoms off silently, her mind already forming the diagnosis and deducing the probable cause.

Donna forced a brighter smile, and ignored the question.

"How's Robbie, Louisa?"

"He's doing well, thanks, Donna. Working harder this semester, getting some good grades. He's fine."

"Great. That's great. And Katie?"

"She's fine."

"That's great. And Megan?"

"Just fine, thanks, Donna. We're all very well. But how are you?"

Donna's smile dimmed.

"Me? Oh, um, well. . . ."

"It's been a while since you were here last," Louisa offered, neutrally. She was used to having to break the ice to get the occupant of the chair opposite her to start talking.

"Two months," Donna said, automatically. "Or a little less. Six weeks, I think. And a couple of days."

She had a head for detail; it was one of the most striking things about her, Louisa had always thought. That she still had it suggested that, whatever the problem was that had brought her here so suddenly this afternoon, it hadn't been going on very long. Physical appearances could be deceptive: with that fair skin and slim figure, even a few bad days were bound to have a visible effect. But it wasn't like her to call at the last minute the way she had today; something was obviously bothering her quite a lot, even if it had just come up recently.

"It was before the show, wasn't it?"

"Yes." Donna hesitated. "I called you afterwards, though, I think."

Her tone suggested that it was really Louisa's memory she was unsure of, not her own—another sign that she was not, in fact, as close to the brink of a crisis as someone with less experience than Louisa might have guessed from the urgency of the woman's voice when she had called an hour ago and asked if Louisa could possibly fit her in today. She had had the good sense to come in early, before things got out of hand—something else Louisa remembered about her from the first time.

She'd been tense and nervous then, too—obviously unhappy and off her stride—but she hadn't been anywhere near a breakdown. Louisa had talked to her about trauma and its natural effects, the importance of early intervention, and the difference between post-trauma stress and post-traumatic stress disorder, and while Donna had seemed glad to be assured that she was not yet showing any signs of having developed a serious psychiatric condition like PTSD, and was unlikely to, as long as she dealt intelligently with her feelings about what had happened and looked after herself, Louisa had had the distinct sense that she was only confirming what Donna had already known. She was the type who would have researched her symptoms on the internet, perhaps more extensively at a library, before ever walking into a therapist's office. And she had come in early, before things reached a crisis.

"That's right," Louisa said, reassuringly. "You said the gallery exhibit had gone well."

"It did. It went very well. Much better than I was expecting. I came through with flying colors; everyone said so. They said I did great. They all said they were proud of me, even—"

She broke off without saying who in particular had been proud of her. Louisa raised an eyebrow and settled back in her chair as Donna continued, rather breathlessly:

"Yes, well, what I mean is, I was proud of myself. You were right; I was able to do it. I don't know why I was so worried about it; it wasn't nearly as hard as I'd thought it would be. They're just pictures, after all. Like you said. Just"—her voice trembled, as though the word was hard for her to say—"pictures. Of me. There's blood on my face, but blood has never really bothered me that much. Not—" Her voice wobbled again, and she paused for a moment. Louisa could see her struggling for control. Finally, though, she took a deep breath and went on: "Not my own blood. I've always had a pretty strong stomach for that. I guess most women do, don't they? We're used to seeing it. Not like men. Not like—"

And she broke off again.

"You haven't been sleeping well, have you, Donna?" Louisa asked after a moment or two. Donna shook her head.

"No," she admitted. "No, not very well."

"Are you having trouble getting to sleep? Or waking up in the night and not being able to go back again?"

"Both, really."

"Bad dreams?"

Donna nodded. Louisa wasn't surprised. It was what she'd been expecting, from the moment the woman had walked through her door.

"It's the pictures, isn't it?"

Donna looked startled. "How did you—" she began, then faltered, broke off. Her surprise puzzled Louisa.

"It's not uncommon, you know," she said, gently. "We talked about this, remember? It was always a possibility, that your mind would take a while to react to what you saw at that show. It doesn't mean you shouldn't have gone, or that you didn't do well, or you've failed—it just means you've got more work to do."

"Oh," Donna said, sounding genuinely surprised. "Oh, no. Oh, no—that's not it. That's not it at all."

Louisa blinked.

"What is it, then?" she asked.

She did a pretty good job, she thought, at keeping her skepticism out of her voice. It was important not to let the patient think you were two steps ahead of her, even when you were.

Donna didn't answer. She was staring down at her hands—which, Louisa could see, were shaking a little. She squeezed them tightly together in her lap, and the trembling seemed to stop.

"What is it, then?" Louisa repeated. And then, when Donna still didn't answer, she spoke more sharply, "Donna?"

"I'm sorry?" Donna said, looking up at last.

Her face was paler than ever—as white as a sheet, Louisa thought. Louisa wasn't much given to examining her thoughts for cliches; if she'd ever thought about it, she would probably have said that phrases only became cliches because they were the most efficient way of expressing a common idea, rather the way labels like "acute stress disorder" or "PTSD" were the most efficient way of talking about a variety of symptoms and causes that might otherwise take far too long to describe.

"I asked what you were saying, Donna," Louisa said, frowning a little.

"What _I_ was saying?" Donna sounded startled, as if she hadn't realized that she hadn't finished her thought. "I'm sorry." She was obviously embarrassed. "I guess I'm a little—abstracted today."

Louisa raised an eyebrow at the unusual choice of word.

"'Abstracted,'" Donna went on, loosening her hands a little and starting to twist something—a kleenex—that she was holding in them. "That's a strange word, isn't it? I looked it up once; it means 'lost in thought.' But it also means that something's been reduced, doesn't it? Condensed, boiled down, like an abstract of a book or an article. I used to do a lot of that at work: Jo—" She broke off, paused a split second, and then started again, still with a touch of hesitation. "My—boss—back then—was always wanting me to make up abstracts of documents for him, articles on this or that, you wouldn't believe the subjects, everything under the sun."

She smiled, a little tremulously. There was a touch of wistfulness in her voice. Louisa knitted her brows together: that boss again. He had been a problem before—at least as much of a problem as the explosion that had killed three men and injured Donna at Gaza. She wondered why he would be surfacing in her client's thought again now; surely everything the woman had achieved since leaving that dead-end job in the dust should have immunized her against thoughts of her old, toxic boss.

"That was tedious for you," she said, helpfully, remembering Donna's concerns about her job then. But Donna didn't respond the way she expected.

"Oh no," Donna said, seriously. Her hands stopped fiddling with the tissue. She clasped them together earnestly, almost pleadingly. "Oh, no. It was very interesting, really; I learned so much that way. It was really quite an education."

She paused, and looked down at her hands for a minute. Louisa waited, curiously. This was very different from the way Donna had spoken about her old job before. It had been a while, of course—almost a year and a half since Donna had left it and joined the Russell campaign. She'd gone from there to the Santos campaign, and then to the White House as Mrs. Santos' Chief of Staff.

Louisa didn't follow Washington politics much—she was Army, through and through—but she'd been pleased by everything Donna had told her about her successes. She'd had to deal with the old boss during the campaign, too, Louisa remembered. He'd been a prick, of course, but somebody else—a woman, naturally—had recognized Donna's abilities and given her the job she'd deserved, and he'd simply had to put up with it. Or that was what Louisa remembered. They hadn't talked about him at all the last time Donna had been here. Clearly something had changed.

"Of course," Donna said, rather vaguely, "'abstracted' has other meanings, too. I looked it up once, just so I could argue about it with—with my boss—and it can mean that something's been removed or separated from something else. . . ."

And her voice drifted away again.

"Donna," Louisa said, patiently. "You were saying?"

Donna looked up, blinking.

"I'm sorry," she said again. "What did you say?"

"Can you finish what you were saying, Donna? Come to your point?"

"Come to the point?" Donna asked, absently. "I think I was. I think that was the point."

Louisa suppressed a slight sigh. There were days when she felt better equipped for this sort of thing than others, and this wasn't one of them. But she had the time—her only other appointment that afternoon had cancelled—and Donna was, after all, paying her for it. That was one of the advantages of private practice; you didn't have to worry about keeping to a schedule determined by the Army or the VA. She made a note or two on the pad of paper on her desk and said, "Why don't you tell me some more about it, Donna? Take your time. Tell it however you need to."

The woman in front of her nodded and settled back in her chair. Her voice wavered a little, and she started to twist the kleenex again, picking at it as she talked, until the legs of her dark pants were covered in fine white dust.

"I guess—I never told you—about what happened last year, at the end of the campaign. About—about me and—" She hesitated again, her lips trembling. There was a long pause.

"And what, Donna?" Louisa asked, evenly.

The pause continued for some time. When Donna finally answered, her voice was almost inaudible. "And—Josh."

Louisa's eyes widened with surprise. She didn't follow the gossip columns in the press or read "People," or she might have picked up on the stories that had started to circulate after the President's inauguration. They had all been short pieces accompanied by small photos—just footnotes, really, to the much larger spreads about the First Family that had appeared at the time.

"No," her therapist said carefully, after a few moments. "No, you didn't."

Donna's pale face turned a delicate shade of pink.

"Well," Louisa said, after another short pause. "Why don't you tell me now?"

The rain slashed against the windows with a hard, rattling sound as Donna started to speak, and a rumble in the distance announced the arrival of the afternoon thunderstorm. They'd been having them all week. Everyone kept hoping they'd clear the air, but they didn't; by evening the sun would be baking down and the sticky heat would return, unabated.

It seemed too early for this sort of weather—it was more like July or August than May—but this, the newscasters kept telling people, was something they could expect to see more often now that all that carbon build-up in the atmosphere was disrupting the weather patterns. Dump enough toxic waste into any system and you changed it, and then you had to live with the consequences. If you could.

A lot of people were clamoring for the government to legislate serious environmental regulation in an effort to reverse the changes, but Louisa herself was of the "learn to live with it" school on global warming. She had a very comfortable income, didn't own any waterfront property, and couldn't imagine turning up the thermostat on her air-conditioning or taking the Metro in to work instead of her Mazda SUV. She could learn to live with warmer weather and stronger storms. She thought of that as adaptation.

TBC. . .


	2. Chapter 2

Donna had been given Louisa D'Amato's name by Kate Harper after the explosion in Gaza two years before. She'd spoken briefly with a psychologist in the hospital in Germany, and a couple of times with another at National Rehab in Washington when she came home. But those had been pro forma visits: brief, perfunctory, and not particularly useful, except that she'd been given a list of symptoms to watch out for, and the reminder that she should seek more extensive professional help if they surfaced.

When they did, it was Kate she turned to first, because Kate was the one who noticed how she was looking and offered her a chance to talk about it. It had eaten her up that it was Kate who saw what she needed, not Josh. "Invisible," she'd thought to herself. "That's what you are to him—invisible. That's what you've always been."

She knew that wasn't really true, and yet it _felt_ true. For every time he'd flirted with her, every time he'd done something unexpected that suggested he felt something for her—every Inaugural Ball, every day in the hospital in Germany—there were twenty other times he'd made it clear that, whatever interest in her he occasionally showed, it was superficial and passing, and nothing he was ever going to act on. And then there was the question of her career. . . .

Kate had provided a surprisingly sympathetic ear. Between her own experiences and her friends', she knew quite a lot about trauma—and quite a lot about men, too. Donna didn't want to talk about Josh to Kate, but Kate asked a few oblique questions and seemed to get a pretty clear sense of how frustrated Donna was in her job, and how annoyed with her boss. Like Donna's mother, she seemed to think at first that Josh's trip to Germany indicated something profound about the nature of his feelings for his assistant. It was easier to disabuse Kate of that idea than it was her mother.

Donna couldn't bring herself to repeat everything C.J. had said before she left for Gaza, but the humiliating words were so burned into her mind that she couldn't help echoing some of the more innocuous comments—the ones about her career—and Kate, who'd had to fight her way tooth and nail over seemingly unscaleable walls thrown up by men's egos and indifference and outright sexism to get where she had, had sympathized more fulsomely than Donna had ever expected when she first let the bitter words out of her mouth.

If Kate guessed that Donna was feeling more in that department than just career frustration, she had the tact not to pursue it. Her advice was to get a good therapist and a new job. She'd heard that Will was hiring. And she had the names of two or three professionals with plenty of experience working with trauma victims, and with women who were having trouble dealing with the men who were holding them back in their careers, too.

The professionals were all women, and had all helped women Kate knew—in the Army or the Navy, the NSA or the CIA. And they all charged considerably less than the only other trauma specialist Donna had any experience with, which was a good thing. She'd seen one of Stanley Keyworth's bills once, when she was straightening up Josh's desk, and had been shocked at what he'd had to pay. His insurance had covered part of it, of course, but what they hadn't would still have made a sizeable dent in Donna's bank account. And Josh had been diagnosed with something that showed up on an HMO-approved list of conditions requiring psychiatric treatment, whereas she was pretty sure she wasn't suffering from anything nearly so severe.

Josh, of course, had been going to the guys at the very top of their profession. He'd said once that the trouble with therapy was finding someone who was smarter than you were, and Donna had snorted and rolled her eyes; only Josh would think it was hard to find a psychiatrist who was smart enough to work with. Donna had no trouble accepting someone lower down on the payscale.

Louisa D'Amato had recently retired from the military and gone into private practice. She was fifty-ish, divorced, with a son in high school and two younger daughters, and something about her reminded Donna of a college professor she had particularly admired. She seemed like the sort of woman who didn't put up with any nonsense from anyone, and yet she projected an air of approval that was very reassuring. Donna always came away from their sessions feeling that really, anything was possible, if she would just take control of her life and move forward, the way Louisa was encouraging her to do.

They talked at length about Gaza—about the stress Donna had been feeling since the explosion there, the fear and guilt and grief—but Donna found herself opening up about other problems, too. If she occasionally felt a pang of guilt about some of what she said—or what she didn't say—about Josh, she told herself it served him right and she didn't care.

It was her therapy, after all; she was the one he had brushed aside and refused to give serious work to and then sent off to be blown up, and if she wanted to let off steam about that, she had every right to. She was speaking in confidence; nothing she said would ever go outside Louisa's office, Louisa had assured her of that; she could say whatever she wanted to and not have to worry about the consequences, because there couldn't be any. And she was enjoying it. It surprised her, how much she enjoyed letting out some of her frustrations with Josh, and finding a sympathetic woman listening and nodding and telling her that she was perfectly entitled to those feelings.

Not that they got into all Donna's feelings about Josh. Louisa probably suspected that a man who occupied so much of a woman's thoughts wasn't there in a purely professional capacity, but Donna rather hurried over the question of what else besides career advancement she might want from Josh, preferring to dwell on his failure to recognize her real abilities at work and his willingness to use her as a dry-cleaning and food-delivery service instead of promoting her into the kind of responsibilities she knew she could handle.

His trip to see her in the hospital in Germany somehow never got mentioned at all. It wasn't something Donna really wanted to talk about; it made her head ache even to think about it. Her mother still talked about it all the time, and Donna was sick to death of trying to explain that it hadn't meant what her mother thought it had at all.

If it had meant _that_, Josh would have _done_ something by now, and he hadn't. Since the day he'd wheeled her back into the White House, he hadn't given much indication that he was really aware of her at all. He'd given her a pen. But he hadn't noticed that she was coming into the office snappish and cross, with bags under her eyes because she was having trouble sleeping; he hadn't considered that she might still be needing help. He couldn't even remember that she liked white wine, not red. And he couldn't let her make her own decision about whether or not to give a press interview; he snatched the phone from her hand and yelled at the man on the other end and hung up, as if she had nothing to do with it at all.

Rude, Louisa had agreed. More than rude: controlling, domineering, completely lacking in even the most basic respect for her. No, Louisa had told her, it was not at all likely that a man like that could be expected to change. There was nothing to be gained from staying in a job with a boss like that; questions of loyalty to the administration were irrelevant; she was being crushed, and she had to look out for herself, to put herself first. The best thing to do was simply to get another job.

Talking to Louisa was a refreshing change from talking to her mother. Louisa didn't insist on anything except Donna's need to put herself first and make decisions that would move her life forward. She was entirely in Donna's camp, which Donna often felt these days her mother wasn't.

Of course, she wasn't paying her mother to be her sounding-board, and her mother knew a good deal more about both her daughter and Josh than Louisa did. But just because her mother knew things didn't mean she understood them, and Donna was fed up with hearing her talk about how wonderful Josh had been after Gaza, how he had arranged her mother's trip there and how good he'd been about sorting out the insurance details afterwards, and what it meant that he'd come to Germany himself and what her mother was sure he was feeling for her, when he obviously wasn't feeling those things at all and never would be, no matter how much she'd always wanted it.

C.J. had pointed out how hopeless that wish was, and she'd been right. Josh must have come to Germany because Leo had wanted him to, because she worked for them and someone had to be there to talk to the doctors, and her father couldn't travel anymore, and Leo had probably realized that her mother would be too upset to deal with all that on her own; there might have been liability issues involved—or just Leo's fatherly kindness. Every time her mother mentioned Josh in Germany, Donna wanted to cry. It was really easier not to talk to Louisa about any of that at all.

Easier not to talk about it, easier not to think about it. Easier just to stick with the obvious—that Josh was her boss, that he'd ignored her and dismissed her whenever she'd tried to take steps to increase her responsibilities and advance her career, that he'd sent her to Gaza on a meaningless make-work assignment, and because he'd sent her there, she'd been blown up. She should never have been there; she should have been doing something more significant back in the White House, or somewhere else in D.C.

C.J. Cregg had said so, after all, and she was a very accomplished woman with a very important job; she should know. Kate Harper—whose job was, if anything, more responsible than C.J.'s—had clearly agreed. And Louisa did, too. Three intelligent, successful women had all said the same thing: "Think of yourself, Donna. You've got to look after yourself. Nobody else is going to do it for you—he's not, is he? Put yourself first, for a change. Put yourself first. Put yourself first. . . ."

They all made it clear they thought Donna should be taking steps to move her career forward, not letting the pathetic crush she suspected they all realized she'd been harboring all these years for her boss keep her from breaking free and doing something more challenging and worthwhile with her life. She only had one life to live, after all, and she'd come close enough to losing it to realize that she couldn't afford to waste any of it. Better to give up her hopes of ever being loved by Josh and create a satisfying career for herself, than waste whatever was left of her life being frustrated in both love and work; and there was, after all, always the possibility that she would eventually find someone else to love her, if she wasn't so busy thinking about Josh that no one else would ever really do.

She wondered sometimes how her mother could be so naive. She supposed that was why she'd been so naive herself; she'd been brought up to it, and even her time with Alan "Freeride" Robertson hadn't opened her eyes. It upset her to hear her own absurd romanticism echoed in her mother's voice. She found herself snapping crossly over the phone whenever her mother asked anything at all about her work or Josh, just to get her to stop. Her mother seemed hurt at first, and then annoyed, and Donna didn't know how to deal with that, because she loved her mother a lot and usually got along with her just fine, but now she couldn't seem to stop being angry with her, because she wouldn't stop talking about Josh.

It was another reason why she had to get away from him; if she had another job, her mother wouldn't have as much excuse to keep bringing him up all the time. On every count, leaving was obviously the best thing to do. If she'd had any question left about it, the cancelled lunches would have been her answer. But really, she'd made up her mind before she'd ever penciled the first one in.

So Donna left and went to work for Will. She called Louisa with tears of joy in her voice just two weeks later, after she'd moved into her first real office of her own, and they rejoiced together in the progress she'd made. A few months later she called the therapist again, this time very close to real tears, after that terrible interview with Josh after the convention, when she'd asked him for a job with the Santos campaign and he'd refused—and again a month or so later, with no trace of tears at all, to report triumphantly that the campaign's communications director had hired her over Josh's objections to join the Santos media team.

And she'd talked to Louisa after Colin Ayres called one day—just after the convention, while she was still working for the Vice-President—and told her that he was planning to mount an exhibition of photographs from Gaza as part of the U.N.'s peacekeeping celebrations, and wanted her to write some short pieces about her experiences there to accompany them; and then later—months later—when, just before the opening of the show, he'd called again to tell Donna more about the pictures he'd selected to exhibit there.

She and the therapist had spent a lot of time discussing Donna's feelings about going to the opening after that. Donna had been upset at first, and reluctant, but in the end, with Louisa's encouragement, she'd decided to go ahead. She'd attended the show's opening in New York in early April, and had called Louisa afterwards to tell her how well it had gone and to thank her for all her help and support.

But somehow Donna had never gotten around to admitting that the boyfriend who had, even if with little enthusiasm, accompanied her to the opening was, in fact, the same rude, controlling, impossible boss that Louisa had encouraged her to walk away from a year and a half before. It was all just too complicated to explain, and since Louisa didn't seem to have seen any of the rumors about Josh and Donna that had made their way into the back pages of the gossip magazines, there wasn't really any necessity to explain anything at all. But now, four and a half weeks later, sitting in Louisa's office shredding kleenex into her lap, her heart pounding in her chest and her mind so overwhelmed she could barely make out what the woman across from her was saying, Donna knew she had to try.

Her voice faltered at times, and her face flushed as she told her therapist about that early morning late in the campaign when the polls had suddenly turned their way and, in a moment of exhilaration, Josh had grabbed her and kissed her and she'd found herself kissing back. She tried to explain what she was sure Louisa had realized long ago: that, for all his faults, Josh was an attractive man and she'd always been attracted to him, even when she'd been angry with him.

She told Louisa how carefully she'd thought about the implications before deciding to let him know that, if he was interested in taking things farther than that kiss and going to bed with her, she wouldn't object. She explained how she'd made up her mind to take charge of the relationship—Louisa was clearly pleased about that—and how she'd told Josh a few days after they'd started sleeping together that he had four weeks to make some decisions about what they were doing and what he wanted, and how he'd ended up asking her to go away with him for a week to lie in the sun in the Caribbean and unwind after the campaign, to have a chance to spend some real time together and talk. And she tried to describe, as best she could, what had happened after that.

But she didn't tell Louisa everything. How could she? There was too much to tell, too many details, all of them tiny and confusing and painful and precious, like shards of some treasured object she had dropped and broken, and was down on her knees now desperately hoping to pick up and somehow piece back together.


	3. Chapter 3

Donna couldn't, for instance, tell Louisa everything about that first kiss. She couldn't tell her about the way Josh had looked, rumpled and only half-dressed and utterly desirable, or about the way she'd wanted to push him back onto the bed and have him even before anything had happened. She couldn't tell her about the way he'd pulled back and looked at her searchingly for a moment, as if wanting an assent, as his hands reached up gently to cup her face and he'd kissed her. She couldn't tell her about the way he'd tasted, of sleep and stale coffee, but under that, something both familiar and new that she'd realized with a strange, heart-aching pang was the taste of him: after all these years, she was tasting Josh.

She couldn't tell Louisa what that had meant to her. And she couldn't tell her about the way his hands had moved down her body, or the way her body had flamed into life at his touch; about the way he'd pulled her to him, or the way she'd forgotten everything else in the desperate need of him. Those were the things she couldn't tell but that mattered more than any of the things she did say. They were burned into her body and soul; she couldn't remember anymore what any other kiss had felt like from any other man, even the first one—only that kiss, and the ones that had come after it. Only Josh.

But those weren't the sorts of things you told somebody else, even your therapist, so Donna just said that she'd taken the polls to Josh's room one morning and he'd kissed her, but Matt Santos had come in and they'd jumped away from each other, and that had been it for a while.

She didn't tell Louisa how she'd burned for him for hours after, or how, when they'd finally had a few minutes alone with each other later, Josh hadn't come back for more the way she'd been hoping, but apologized instead: it was "inappropriate," he didn't know what had come over him, he was sorry, it wouldn't happen again.

His reaction made her feel ridiculous and humiliated, and although she thought Louisa might approve of her reply—"It was bound to happen eventually," she'd said, trying desperately to look as if she was keeping her cool—she didn't want to have to tell her what she'd really been feeling, how she'd wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, but really she'd just wanted to go back to that kiss and where it had been taking them, just wanted him to want her so much he simply couldn't stop himself, because that was the way she wanted him. But he hadn't, not then, and not for quite a bit after—which was the last thing she wanted to admit to anyone else, even Louisa.

She certainly didn't want to tell Louisa that whole absurd business about the key. She still didn't know if Josh hadn't picked it up because he'd been surprised, or because—for whatever strange reasons his mind might come up with—he really hadn't wanted to. She would have gone with surprise if he'd come to her room later, or even if he'd called, but he hadn't, and she still wondered why.

That was the trouble with Josh: she knew him inside and out and backwards most of the time, but she still sometimes felt as if she didn't know him at all. Any normal man would have come to her room after that if he'd wanted her at all, but Josh of course wasn't any normal man. Maybe he hadn't come because he'd just been too busy or too tired. Or maybe he was still worrying about appropriateness. Or maybe she'd put on the wrong outfit that morning, or had food between her teeth or something, and he really hadn't felt all that attracted in the moment, even though he obviously had been when they'd kissed.

Or, of course, maybe he just hadn't wanted to deal with all the stuff that would inevitably come up between them if they slept together. There was a lot of history there, and Josh had enough history of his own that he might very well shy away from any kind of sex that would be too emotionally entangling.

She'd had a theory once that he was scared to get too close to anyone, because it hurt too much when the people he loved left him or died. She'd always wondered about the kind of women he seemed to choose when he did get into a relationship: Mandy and Amy had seemed to her to care more about politics than people, which didn't make them very good choices for any long-term kind of thing. But perhaps that was exactly why he'd chosen them, because he knew in advance that they really weren't going to expect very much from him in the way of emotional involvement, and he didn't really want very much from them that way, either.

And perhaps that was why he hadn't gone for her years ago, in spite the times when she'd thought maybe something really was going to happen between them, because she hadn't known how to keep her emotions off her face then, and seeing how much she'd cared had scared him off. Of course, they were involved now, but she'd been working very hard not to let him know just how much he still mattered to her, so she wouldn't put him off, and so she wouldn't die of shame when—if—he started to push her away.

They were involved now because eventually, of course, they _had _made it to bed, but the way they'd done it hadn't given Donna any clues about what Josh was really feeling or what, besides sex, he might really want.

He'd asked her if she'd ever "come on board" during a campaign before, a question that raised a whole string of other questions in her mind: Was he trying to warn her that campaign sex was all he was offering? Or was it just a clumsy attempt at a pick-up line? She wouldn't have expected Josh to be very adept at that sort of thing, but surely he could have managed something a little smoother than that if he'd wanted to. So maybe it was a warning: this is going to be casual, don't expect anything else.

On the other hand, maybe he'd asked because he really wanted to know. But why would he have to ask? He must have known the answer; she'd been glued to his side all through both Bartlet for America campaigns; she'd hardly had time to be coming on board with anybody except him. Had he just not noticed? She'd always wondered how much he really took in of what she was doing: whether it was the local gomers themselves who irritated him, or just her constant chattering about them; whether he really cared what she did on her dates, or not. There'd been so many times when she'd thought he wanted her and was jealous of the men she went out with, but so many other times when she hadn't been able to tell what he was thinking at all.

Especially in recent years, after Gaza, when he hadn't done anything to try to make things happen between them, or after she'd resigned. She'd wondered very briefly then if maybe, when she wasn't working for him anymore, he'd come after her, but he hadn't, of course: he'd gone after Matt Santos instead. So she'd worked for Russell, and he'd worked for Santos, and when she'd tried to come back, after the convention, he hadn't wanted anything to do with her at all.

And yet, even while he was telling her to go, he'd told her that he missed her every day. That was so maddeningly typical of Josh: to do and say things that made her want to tear him out of her heart and stomp him to pieces, and then come back with something like that that made it impossible to forget about him and get on with her life. It wasn't like she hadn't had other opportunities: there'd been plenty of chances, on the Russell campaign, and all the ones before that. But she'd never taken any of them up on more than the offer of a drink after work, or dinner.

And maybe that was why he'd asked if she'd ever come on board. Maybe he'd been wondering what she'd been doing all those months when she'd been away from him. Maybe he wondered because he'd missed her, because he really cared. But then again, maybe he was just wondering if he should be worried about who she'd been with and how safe the sex had been. Or maybe it was just Josh's idea of a smooth pick-up line. Or maybe it was his way of telling her that campaign sex was all he wanted and all she was going to get. . . .

And she'd been willing to settle for that right then, because she'd been wanting him so much, ever since that kiss. So she'd said no—no, she'd never come on board during a campaign. He'd asked her if she wanted another drink, and she'd said no again. She'd said no to everything he said, and he'd finally heard the yes she was willing into her words and her legs and followed her upstairs.

On the outside she knew she'd stayed calm, but inside she'd never felt more nervous in her life: her heart was fluttering, her stomach felt like it was tied in knots, and she wondered if she was going to distinguish herself by actually being sick.

At the break in the corridor he'd stopped, and looked at her uncertainly. Her room was down the hall to the left; his was straight ahead.

"So, um," he'd said, brilliantly. She'd looked at him as coolly as she knew how, flicked her hair back, and kept walking.

When they got to his door she put her hand out; he put his keycard into it and let her walk in first. The door had shut slowly behind him. He stood with his back to it, looking at her, and she'd turned around and looked at him, and they stood like that for almost a whole minute, just looking at each other: his eyes full of doubt and desire, and she doing everything she could not to let hers show how badly she was shaking inside.

And then he reached out and took her face in his hands again, and started to kiss her, hard, and it wasn't long before they were ripping each other's clothes off and gasping together on the bed, and not really much longer before she was crying out half in agony and half in bliss, and he was too.

It was good sex, the intensity of it more than making for the relative briefness. And yet when it was all over she'd wanted to curl up in a little ball and cry, because everything had changed and nothing had, and she had no idea where this was going, or what, besides predictable male desire, he really felt for her at all.

But she didn't let herself cry. Instead she rolled over and acted as if she was trying to sleep, and after a while she slipped out of bed and took the computer into the bathroom so she could check the latest news reports while getting dressed. He came in after her, looking tousle-haired and bewildered and utterly desirable, but she just said, "I really want to win this thing"—as if he didn't, and as if there was something she could actually do about it now.

It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the point, either: the point was to put some distance between them, and remind him that she was a pro now and the fact that they'd just had sex together wasn't really anything like as important as the win. She didn't want him to forget that.

And she didn't want to forget it herself. She was afraid that, if she really let herself think about what had just happened—about the fact that she'd just slept with the man she'd worked for and loved and longed for for almost nine years, she'd go to pieces and forget about everything else, and everything she'd achieved this past year would slip away from her.

She was almost certain that _he_ was going to slip away from her: she'd actually been surprised that she'd made it out of bed and into her clothes before he had. This was campaign sex, after all. Whether Josh wanted it to be anything more than that she had no idea, but she certainly wasn't going to find out today. Or tonight: there'd be victory sex when it was all over if they won, probably comfort sex if (oh God, don't think it) they didn't, and maybe a little stress-relief sex between now and then if he wanted it and she did too, but other than that, she knew neither one of them would have a thought to spare for anything except the election today.

Any talk they were going to have would have to wait until tomorrow. And that was a good thing, because she was a pro now and she really couldn't afford to get all emotional and fall apart on Election Day.

But of course they didn't talk that day or the next one, either, or the one after that—or not about what they'd just done. Leo died, and neither one of them was able to think or talk about anything else but that.

When they'd finally made it to Josh's room that night, Josh had said, "I'm sorry, I don't think I can—" and she'd said, "It's all right. I couldn't either," and he'd wrapped his arms around her and held her very tight, and said, "I just can't believe he's gone," and she'd said, "I know. I can't either."

"If I just hadn't asked him—" Josh's voice had been thick and low.

"It's not your fault, Josh," she tried to soothe him. "It's not your fault."

"What was I thinking of, Donna? He'd had a heart attack last fall; I should never have put him through that—"

"He loved every minute of it, Josh, you know he did."

"He never even got to see it; he worked so hard for this, and he didn't get to see any of it. He didn't even get to know."

"He knew, Josh. I'm sure he knew we were going to win."

Josh shook his head then.

"It's not the same," he said, bitterly. "It's not the same."

And Donna hadn't known what to say to that at all. He was right: whatever Leo had or hadn't known in his heart, it could never be the same as having been there to taste the win himself. And the win wasn't the same anymore: it hardly felt like a victory; more like a defeat.

Josh buried his head in her neck, and she could feel his shoulders heaving and the warm wetness on his face pressed against her. And she grieved, not just for Leo, but for the man crying in her arms, who had worked so hard this past year, and surely had deserved something better than to have all the joy of his accomplishment taken from him along with the man he'd loved almost like a second father—and she remembered that other time, when his real father had died on the night they won the Illinois primary, and she cried for that all over again, too.

But along with her grief she was aware of other feelings that made her almost ashamed, because it seemed wrong that any corner of her mind should be given over to anything except mourning Leo and comforting Josh. But she couldn't help it; from time to time, other thoughts pushed their way in: amazement that they had won, and she had played a real part in it; another kind of amazement that Josh was in her arms after all these years, holding her and confiding in her and finding some sort of comfort simply in being close to her; and, on the heels of that, the unsettling awareness that, whatever she might be to him tonight, there were no guarantees that he would feel the same way or want the same things tomorrow.

She wasn't really surprised to find that he was already up and gone when she woke in the morning. He'd left a note: "Got to see Matt. Sorry about last night. Talk to you later."

Which was more than she'd expected, but still told her nothing, and left her wondering with a sinking heart what it was he was sorry about. Not having had sex with her? Having opened himself up by breaking down in front of her? What was he going to do about it now? She sighed, put the note in her pocket, and went out to start taking care of the hundreds of things that were waiting to be done that day.

When she finally saw him, he was talking to five people at once, and didn't have time to do more than give her a small half-smile. He was insanely busy all day, obviously still stunned by both victory and grief. He left for D.C. later that day, taking Leo's body home to his daughter and her mother and the President who had been his best friend. Donna had to stay behind with the rest of the campaign staff, while the Santoses took a few days at home in Houston to regroup and recover.

It was three days before she saw Josh again, at Leo's funeral. She was nearly knocked off her feet when he asked her if she still had a key to his apartment and offered to let her stay there since her place was still sublet. That was—sweet. There was no denying that was very sweet.

But it was frightening, too: they still hadn't talked about anything, so she really had no idea what he had in mind; it would be too easy to assume that a gesture like that meant more than it did. She wondered if, really, he didn't have anything in mind except getting more sex and getting it more easily—and if that was all this was about, she couldn't go on with it, much though she was enjoying the sex herself.

She couldn't afford to slip into living with him, even temporarily, without having talked about anything: it would be too easy just to go on that way without ever talking, and then she'd find out too late that he didn't really feel the things she needed him to feel, and wasn't willing to do the things she needed him to do for her. That was how things had happened with Alan.

She didn't want to do that again, and she didn't want Josh to think she was too eager to do it with him, anyway, because too much eagerness always put a man off—she'd certainly learned that one over the years. So she told him she couldn't, and was glad she wasn't even lying: she'd already made arrangements to stay with C.J.

His attempt to talk her out of it surprised her even more than his initial offer had: surely he must see the implications of what he was suggesting, now that she'd pointed them out to him? It couldn't possibly just be her who was finding all this awkward and hard to navigate, could it?

She said as much to him, and of course he said no, she was right, it wasn't just her, which was almost a relief to hear. She hadn't known what was happening there for a minute; she'd been so sure he wouldn't really want her staying over regularly yet, wouldn't really be comfortable with her more or less moving in. And of course he hadn't been. He just hadn't considered the implications of what he was suggesting, or else he was trying to act nonchalantly to hide the fact that, really, he was just as confused and scared by what they were doing as she was.

Confused and scared, she thought, was okay. At least it was better than being certain, if certainty meant knowing that all he wanted from her was just campaign sex, or knowing that he didn't want to be as close to her emotionally as Leo's death had almost forced him to be. They needed to talk—they both knew that—but of course they didn't do it; he was always too busy, or too tired, or both of them were just too interested in doing something else.

But they couldn't go on like that, so she'd changed it. She lay in bed one morning rehearsing what she was going to say, and was quite pleased with the little speech she was able to work out. She told him she didn't know what this thing they were doing was all about, and she knew he didn't know, either. And she'd laid down the rules: four weeks, or else. They had four weeks to figure out what they wanted from this, or it was over.

He'd tried to wiggle out of it, of course, told her the next day that things were too crazy at work and he couldn't give the time or thought to work things out with her right now—but she didn't let him off the hook. And when he finally offered her a job with the administration—Assistant Press Secretary—she said she couldn't work with him and sleep with him, and couldn't work with him if they stopped sleeping together, either— which was probably more than she should have admitted right then, but fortunately he didn't seem to notice.

She stuck to her guns on both the job and the deadline. She was proud of herself for that: it was just what Louisa would have told her to do.

oooooo

Donna did tell Louisa that part, and was rewarded with a smile of approval.

"That was good," Louisa said. "You took charge of the relationship. You decided what you needed, and told him. That was very good."

Donna would have smiled back once. But on that rainy morning in early May, she couldn't manage it. She just squeezed her hands together tightly in her lap, and tried to explain, in a faltering voice, how things had gone from there.


	4. Chapter 4

Taking charge had actually worked more spectacularly well than Donna had ever expected. Just a few hours after she'd renewed the deadline, Josh grabbed her at her desk and said,

"Go pack a bag. We're out of here."

"What?" she said, more than a little stunned.

"I said, go pack," he said, with his best grin, the one that showed all his dimples in full force. "We're taking a vacation. Now. Tonight. A week. Together. So go on—go pack."

"We are?" she asked, unable to stop the smile that was starting to stretch her face from ear to ear.

"We're leaving from Dulles at 6:30," he said. "Sam's filling in for me. The President-elect is cool with it; said he'd drive me to the airport himself if it wouldn't mean a motorcade. Sam will deal with Lou for you, and I don't think Mrs. Santos will mind, either—you weren't planning to start tomorrow, were you?"

She shook her head, still beaming.

"So, tell her if you want to, but then go pack!"

And he pulled her to him and gave her a kiss, right there where anybody walking by could see, and then stepped away, whistling and practically bouncing on the balls of his feet.

"Um, Josh?" she said, smiling at him indulgently. Really, he was irresistible when he was like this, though she didn't want him to find out she thought so.

"Yeah?" He was still grinning.

"What am I packing for? What do I need to bring?"

"A swimsuit," he said. "Preferably a bikini. And some very short skirts or shorts. And some of those tops that wrap around your neck and leave your shoulders and tummy all bare"—and he actually reached out and put a hand on hers. It was just as well that nobody _was_ passing by. She laughed; she couldn't help it.

"Anything else?"

"Some sunscreen, I guess. We can rub it on each other. Oh, and your passport—don't forget that."

"My passport?" she said, startled.

"Barbados," Josh said, smiling. "Sam knew a place that sounded pretty nice."

"Great," she said, beaming at him again. "Yours is in your—" and then she stopped, because that was the kind of thing she'd promised herself she wouldn't do anymore. She could _not _afford to start acting like his assistant again. But old habits were hard to break.

She felt her smile slipping as she thought about it. Josh's had slipped, too. He looked at her oddly for a moment.

"In my desk at home," he said quietly, finishing her sentence for her. "Yeah, I know."

"Right," she said, awkwardly. "Well, that's lovely; I'd better go get ready."

"Yeah," he said, smiling again, though not quite so broadly as before. "See you at the airport. Dulles, remember. Boarding at six-thirty."

"I'll see you there."

"Don't be late."

"Like I would." She'd always been the one who had to say that to him.

But she almost was late. She had to finish what she was doing and dash home and pack a bag and change, because she couldn't possibly fly to the Caribbean wearing pantyhose and a business suit. And since it was winter she had to dig through everything in her closet to find her bikini and some summer skirts and blouses, and since it was Josh she was going with she had to put on six different outfits before finding one she thought looked right: slim white cotton pants (their length a concession to the reality that it was mid-November and no longer warm out in Washington) and a soft, flowery blouse that looked pretty and flirty and, she hoped, enticing, without making it seem as if she was trying too hard, as if it mattered too much to her how she was dressed when she got on a plane to fly off to Barbados for a week of sun and sex with him. No trip with a man had ever mattered to her more, which made it essential that it not show that it mattered too much.

They'd already boarded the plane when she arrived. Typically, he hadn't waited for her; he was already in his seat. But she was too happy to let that bother her, especially when she saw the way he smiled when he saw her.

"Hey," he said, softly, and his voice made her heart beat just a little faster.

"May I just say," she'd said, using her best sultry tones as she slipped into her seat, "this was a truly excellent notion."

"Sam's," he answered, which made her laugh. Of course; it would be.

"The vacation," he'd clarified then. "The going with you part was all me." Which was so sweet it earned him a kiss.

Two years ago she would have melted at the look on his face, dissolved in a little puddle at his feet at the way he kissed her back. But that was two years ago. She wasn't going to let herself lose her cool about him now; not yet, not until she really knew where he was coming from on this and what it all meant to him. And so, when she pulled back from the kiss, she said,

"All you? I think some part of it was me."

Sam might have insisted Josh take a vacation, but she had a strong feeling that, if she hadn't given him that ultimatum, he wouldn't have thought of going any farther from the office than his apartment, where he'd have holed up with a stack of files and his cell phone, his only concession to the idea of "vacation" being to work from home in his boxers and undershirt.

"Nope," he answered, with a grin that was all Josh, half cocky, half sweet: "Bringing you along was all my idea. But I'm hoping you're planning to make all of you available all of the time to all of me."

That was insufferable.

"What do you mean, _'bringing'_ me along, Josh? I'm not your BlackBerry, or your umbrella, or something," she said, a little more sharply than she really intended to.

He blinked for a moment and the cocky smile slipped and he looked startled, which wasn't like him—he used to be better at getting a snappy reply back to her when she said things like that—and said, "I didn't bring either of those."

And she said, "You didn't bring me, either; I'm paying for my ticket, you know."

And he said, "But I booked the tickets. And the hotel. You're planning to stay with me there, aren't you?"

His face was so comically worried that she relented then and gave him a smile to let him know she was joking when she said, "That depends."

"On what?"

"On how nicely you behave between now and then. And how much I like the hotel."

And he'd reached over and put a hand on her leg, high up, and said, "What do you mean by nice?" while stroking his thumb suggestively along the inside of her thigh. She could feel his fingers through the thin fabric of her pants; his touch made her shiver. But she'd put a hand over his and wrapped her fingers around his fingers and moved his hand down six inches, and said,

"Nice means lots of things, and one of them is not doing anything to embarrass me in front of all these other passengers."

And they'd gone on like that for a while, until finally he quieted down, and after a bit she looked over and realized he was asleep.

He slept for about half an hour, then suddenly startled awake. She put down her book to look over at him, and saw his eyes wide and blinking and disoriented, so she put a hand on his knee and said, "Josh," very gently, and he'd sat up a little then and put his hand over hers and smiled at her sleepily and said, "I'm not dreaming this, am I? We're really on a plane flying to Barbados?"

"For a whole week, Josh."

"Wow. I really must be dreaming. But why am I dreaming I'm on a plane, instead of there and in bed already with you?"

She reached over and gave his arm a pinch, just for fun.

"Ouch!" he said, rubbing his arm and pretending to look hurt. "What was that for?"

"To prove you're not dreaming," she said, smiling sweetly. She wanted to kiss the place she'd pinched, but didn't; she really needed to keep her cool.

They chatted for a while about Barbados, Josh tossing off comic innuendos with every second word before he surprised her by asking, his voice suddenly serious,

"Are you looking forward to it?"

"Mmmm," she said. "Of course I am. All that sunshine and blue water. Nothing to do."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, it should be great," but his voice didn't sound like he was really sure.

"You don't sound convinced," she commented.

"Of course I'm convinced," he said, forcing more enthusiasm into his voice. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"All that sunshine and blue water. Nothing to do," Donna pointed out. "You have no idea how you're going to manage a whole week with nothing to do."

He laughed, a little ruefully, and said, "Yeah, it feels kind of strange, you know?"

She nodded. "I know."

"But there'll be _something_ to do," he said, slipping his hand up her thigh again. "Something I want to do very much."

"We can't do that all the time," she pointed out.

"I can," he said, with an exaggerated wiggle of his eyebrows. "You still have no idea how long I can—" She laughed, cutting him off.

"Well, not with me," she said firmly, and he gave her a funny look and said,

"You want me to do it with somebody else?"

So she slapped his hand lightly and said, "Not if you want to do it with me," and he said, "All I want is to do it with you," in that tone of voice that made her heart do treacherous things again, but also made her want to pull on the reins, because she just couldn't tell how important any of this was to him at all.

He tried slipping his hand around her thigh another time, very high up, which would have been lovely except that the steward and stewardess were just coming up the aisle with the drinks cart, and could see. So she pushed it back the way she had before, and he tried again, making a funny face at her while he did it, so she laughed when she pushed his hand back again, and then he slipped his arm across her shoulders and pulled her towards him and kissed her very sweetly on her cheek, and then he tipped his head back against his seat and closed his eyes, and a few minutes later she heard his breathing slowing down, and knew he had fallen asleep again.

She turned her face sideways and looked at him. Somehow, when he was sleeping, it was easier to see just how tired he really was. There were lines and splotches and shadows all over his face that didn't show as much when he was awake and talking, his hands moving everywhere, teasing and pleasing and amusing and annoying her all at the same time. She wondered why he felt he had to act like that with her when he was so tired: there was something about his flirtatiousness just now that had seemed more like a performance than actual, immediate desire. He was too obviously exhausted to really want to do any of that right now, and yet he seemed to feel he had to act as if he did.

She wondered, too, not for the first time, how much of all that manic Josh-stuff was just what he did to keep himself from slowing down—to keep anyone, including himself, from noticing that he needed to slow down and making him do it, although Sam and the President-elect had already noticed, and slowing down was what this week away was supposed to be for.

It was as if he was afraid of what would happen, if he ever stopped driving himself forward and let up on himself—really let up on himself—the way he almost never did, the way he was supposed to be doing on this trip now. Afraid the world would fall apart, probably, without him there to hold it together. And afraid, perhaps, that he'd fall apart, too: afraid of what he'd find in himself, if he ever stopped joking around and let himself think about things—personal things—seriously for more than half a minute at a time.

Or no, that was wrong—she was pretty sure Josh knew exactly what he'd find. She'd seen him in his bad moments often enough, seen that dark look in his eyes often enough, to be reasonably certain that Josh knew himself far better than he liked other people to think he did. And far better than he was comfortable with other people knowing him.

What she wasn't sure of was why he was still keeping that bantering, smirking shield up around her. "We have to talk," he'd said, more than once, always when he was on the phone and real talk was a conveniently long time and distance away, but when they were actually together, serious talk about anything except work was the last thing he wanted to do.

Which in a way had been suiting her just fine: she had no idea how to have the conversation she knew they had to have if anything lasting was going to come of this, and she was horribly afraid that, when they did try to have it, everything was going to come unraveled and fall apart, and they were going to lose even the superficial level of closeness to each other they'd managed to achieve in the little while they'd been together.

She knew better than to fool herself into thinking that his wanting to go on a tropical vacation with her had to mean much; he'd planned a trip to Tahiti with Amy Gardner once, after all. And Donna had had too much experience of sex to have any illusion that, by itself, it could be counted on to bring the two of them together in any meaningful way. It could only do that if the relationship was already meaningful, and if it meant pretty much the same thing to both partners at the same time. But she had no idea what this relationship meant to Josh, or what he was willing to do to sustain it in the future. And that was what he was going to have to get serious and tell her, sometime during this week together, or she was going to have to make herself walk away.

She shivered a little, because the thought of doing that was almost more than she could bear. Almost, but not quite: it was just a shade less unbearable than the alternative: the possibility of staying with Josh, loving him in the way she knew she wouldn't be able to stop herself from loving him if they went on like this, and never being sure she was loved in the same way too.

Or being pretty sure she wasn't, that she was a familiar comfort to him, an enjoyable outlet for his sexual energies, but that his heart really just didn't have room in it for the kind of love she wanted—a love that would be capable of putting another real person first, not just the abstract ideals and impersonal voting numbers and laws and bills that always seemed to command ninety percent of Josh's attention and demand ninety percent or more of his commitment and enthusiasm and time.

And not just any other person, of course, but her. And not just "her" as a tall, slim woman with a strikingly elegant figure and pale skin and long blonde hair and a smile even she knew was dazzling—a prize plenty of men in Washington would have been glad to enjoy on their arms at parties, and in bed later on—and not just "her" as his familiar assistant who knew that he liked his burgers burnt like hockey pucks and what to buy his mother for her birthday and which shirt he should wear to look his best on t.v.—and not just "her" as a tennis partner in the game of talk they'd always played so easily, batting the conversational ball back and forth with little jabs of sarcasm and wit in that way that always left her, at least, with the intellectual equivalent of a runner's high—not just those Donnas, but the rest of her, too. The Donna who wanted to prove herself in the world he'd been a star in for years. The Donna who wanted her ideas to be taken seriously, not condescended to or brushed aside.

Her ideas, her hopes, her dreams, her fears. . . . She wanted the kind of love that could embrace all of that, and a lover who would care enough about it—about her—to put her first. Not all the time—that would be unreasonable—and, with his job, impossible. But not just when it was convenient for him, either.

She didn't really know how that worked. She'd never been in a relationship where that kind of balance was even a possibility, had no idea how people worked that sort of thing out. Her parents' marriage was pleasant enough, but she didn't really think her mother had had many hopes and dreams or doubts and fears that hadn't been easily met by her husband's faithful departure to an uninteresting but steady job—while she went off to her own uninteresting but steady job—every day, or by his equally faithful return home to his family at night.

It would be a tricky thing with the most willing and able partner, to strike that balance between someone's doing what he reasonably needed to do for himself and his job, and still being willing some of the time to show that she mattered more. Whether it was even possible with a man like Josh, who had a job like the one he was going into, she had no idea. But she knew she wanted it. Needed it. She'd put herself last for far too long—in her work, in her relationships with other men, with Josh. Most of all, with Josh.

She had to stop doing that; she had to learn to put herself first. C.J. had said so. Kate had said so. Louisa had said so, many times. But looking at the man stretched out in the seat next to her, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion while his hand still rested on her knee, she had no idea how she was going to be able to keep from giving herself up to him completely all over again.


	5. Chapter 5

It was late when they got to Barbados. They took a taxi from the airport to their hotel. Donna hadn't had anything to do with making the arrangements, and had been wondering what sort of place Sam would have recommended that would have appealed to Josh: one of the big resorts that offer easy-to-book vacation packages, she'd imagined, resigning herself to the thought of busy lobbies and miles of corridors and the sort of sterile elegance (if she was lucky; sterile inelegance if she wasn't) that places like that inevitably provide.

But the taxi took them past one big hotel after another until they seemed to have gotten right past the touristy town. They drove down quiet roads lined with high green hedges, and then slowed and turned through a pair of tall wrought-iron gates, their wheels crunching on the gravel driveway that stretched in front of them, white and gleaming in the moonlight. At the end of it, nestled among carefully manicured lawns and shrubbery, was a large old house with stuccoed walls and a tiled roof, its wide front porch beautifully draped with flowering vines. Beyond the house she could see more lawns and gardens sweeping down to a wide curve of sand and a wider expanse of shimmering moonlight and sparkling darkness that could only be the sea.

"Oh, my goodness!" Donna said, as she stepped out of the car. The driver was getting their bags out of the trunk and taking them up the steps and inside. Josh looked at her and smiled.

"Is this okay, then?" he asked.

"Okay?" Donna laughed. "Yes, this is okay, Josh." She took a deep breath. The air was warm but not heavy, fresh with the breeze from the water, and thick with sweet scents she didn't recognize but knew must be coming from the flowers all around them. "Do you smell that? What do you think it is? Bougainvillea? Frangipani?" She turned the words over on her tongue. She had no idea what either bougainvillea or frangipani looked or smelled like, but she'd always loved their names.

"I haven't got a clue," Josh said, slipping his arm around her back and burying his face in her hair. "But it doesn't smell anything like as nice as you do."

The driver came back down the steps and beamed at them, saying something to Josh about a nice stay and mentioning, in a lilting accent and almost deferential tones, the price of the trip. Josh straightened up, dug out his wallet, and paid him—adding, Donna noticed, a generous tip—then wrapped his arm around Donna's waist again and led her up the steps, through the tall doors, and inside.

She looked around her with delight at the high ceilings and cool tile floors, the gleaming brass fixtures and mahogany furniture, the calla lilies and potted palms swaying gently in the breeze stirred by the wide-armed ceiling fans circling gently overhead. Josh was talking quietly to the liveried man behind the desk, and another man, also in uniform, was gathering up their bags. A minute later they were being led up a great, curving staircase and along a wide, high-ceilinged hall. Their guide stopped at a room at the end. Donna felt her stomach tighten with nervous anticipation as the receptionist put the old-fashioned key in the lock and opened the door. This was ridiculous, she thought: she'd slept with Josh plenty of times by now, there wasn't any reason to be shaking inside as if this was the first. But she was.

The man set their bags inside the room, hoped they would find everything satisfactory, urged Josh to call the desk if there was anything at all that they desired, and left, closing the door quietly behind him.

Beyond a fleeting impression of space and elegance, Donna had no idea what the room looked like: all she was aware of was Josh, his eyes warm and bright as they caught hers, his smile almost shy in the moment when he just stood, looking at her, before he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tight against him.

His mouth soft and gentle at first as it met hers, then as hard and demanding as the rest of him as he walked her backwards across the room and, to her astonishment, bent slightly and slipped an arm under her knees to scoop her up, literally sweeping her off her feet and onto the beautifully be-linened bed. And then his hands and mouth moving over every inch of her, until her consciousness was so filled with delicious sensation that she could think of nothing else except what he was making her body feel and do.


	6. Chapter 6

Donna woke to a soft breeze on her skin and a room full of dappled, dancing light. When she propped herself up on her elbow she was startled to see how large the room was, and how beautiful, in that colonial, tropical style that she'd seen in magazines and travel brochures. Some of the furniture looked like quite good antiques, and the bed-linens were very soft and fine.

Josh muttered something and turned over restlessly beside her; she smiled and slipped out of bed as quietly as possible, leaving him to sleep as long as he could. He needed it. He'd slept during much of the trip here, but never very deeply or for very long at a time, and last night had been more of the same: she'd woken several times to feel him tossing beside her, and once she'd opened her eyes to see him standing by the long windows, looking out.

She'd called him back to bed, and he'd come, and made love to her again with an urgency and need that had surprised her, considering what they'd managed to accomplish earlier. His sleep had seemed deeper after that. She herself felt quite rested now, in spite of the disturbed night, but it didn't really surprise her that Josh needed more, or that he wasn't finding it easy to get it even when he had the chance. He'd been working on far too little for far too long; it was going to take his body a while to get used to being able to have what it needed.

She started to pad across the room to the bathroom, but stopped when she saw the view. Gauzy curtains billowed into the room beside long French windows that opened onto a balcony with a carved balustrade and wooden deck furniture that was probably teak, but Donna hardly noticed any of that; she was entirely transfixed by the view beyond the deck: the broad crescent of gleaming white sand, the lush greens of the hilly islands in the harbor, and that incredible expanse of turquoise water and sky. She took a deep breath of the sweetly-scented floral air and felt a little giddy after it. Somewhere a bird was singing, an intricate, bright song she didn't think she'd ever heard before.

She had no idea how long she stood there, naked in front of the windows, caressed by the warm breeze and getting drunk on all that blue water and flowery, perfumed air. It didn't matter: the brilliant light outside and the comparative dimness of the room around her would shield her from any prying eyes; she could do what she liked.

She felt her body and soul growing lighter with every dizzying breath. Washington was a million miles away. This really _was_ paradise, she thought, and she was here with Josh, and everything that had ever gone wrong in her whole life was over and done with, and from now on everything was going to be different: good and beautiful and sparkling and new.

She laughed at herself even as she thought it, but the conviction stayed with her in a lightness of heart that she had no desire to weigh down with sober, rational thought. When she finally tore herself away from the view and made her way to the enormous and extremely well-appointed bathroom, she felt as if she were walking on air. She sang in the shower, and if she forgot about not waking Josh up, he didn't seem to mind at all.

Afterwards, lying lazily in one of the deck chairs on the balcony, her hair spread out to dry in the sun and a tray of fruit and rolls between them, Donna stretched out a foot and plucked the newspaper out of Josh's hand with her toes. He gaped at her, blinking.

"I can't believe you did that."

"I have very talented toes."

"I was enjoying that paper."

"Now you can enjoy my toes."

He grinned, and brought her foot up to his mouth.

"Eeks! That tickles! Stop it, Josh! Cut it out!"

"Why? I thought you wanted me to enjoy your toes?"

"Agh, stop it, you beast! Oh. Oh. Oh, don't stop that. . . ."

It was almost noon before they got out of their room. They walked down to the beach and strolled on the sand, feeling the water lapping warmly about their ankles. Josh didn't seem inclined to go in, so Donna let him retreat to the shade of palm tree while she swam. When she came out, he was asleep again. She stretched herself out on a towel beside him and watched him indulgently. She pulled out the novel she had bought at the airport, but the sun and the swim and Josh's restless night and the crazy pace of the last few weeks finally caught up with her, and before she had finished the first chapter she had fallen asleep herself.


	7. Chapter 7

Those first few days really were like paradise. The hotel was perfect, their room was perfect, the setting was perfect, the weather was perfect. And Josh, amazingly, seemed pretty close to perfect, too.

He was willing to do anything Donna wanted to do, any time she wanted to do it. Sex, of course—that was no surprise—but other things, too. After that first sleepy afternoon, he swam when she wanted to swim, played tennis when she felt like playing tennis, went scuba-diving when she wanted to go scuba-diving, walked on the beach and put shells in his pockets when she wanted to collect shells. He booked a guide to take them out in a glass-bottomed boat to admire the fish on the coral reef, and another to sail them around the islands in the bay that she'd been wondering about. When she confessed, after too much wine at dinner one night, that the only golfing she'd ever done had been on a putt-putt course, he took her out on the links and tried to show her how to swing a real club, without laughing at the results or making a single crack about caddying for him instead.

He was even willing to go shopping with her, and managed to make himself look, if not exactly excited, at least patient and uncomplaining while she oooed and ahhhed over all the enticing little boutiques in town. He teased her a little about buying so many things she could have found just as easily in similar boutiques at home, but that was only to be expected, and he more than made up for it by pulling his wallet out and buying the necklace and earrings she'd mooned over late in the day, when she'd already spent far too much money and had realized, rather sadly, that her budget couldn't handle any more and she really was going to have to slow down. Slowing down her shopping impulses was a lot easier to do than slowing down her heart when Josh smiled and handed the little package to her as they left the shop.

"You shouldn't have," she said, hoping he wouldn't notice the unsteadiness in her voice.

"Why not?" he said, grinning down at her.

"They were expensive."

"Not that bad. You can make it up to me later on."

Which she did, of course, though, for everything she did for him that way, he seemed determined to do three times as much for her. She'd thought he was a good lover when they'd started this, but she hadn't had any idea of just how good he could be when he wasn't tired and stressed to the nth degree. He was an overachiever in bed, just the way he was in everything else, it seemed, which really shouldn't have been surprising; she suspected his ego required it.

Of course, nothing could be completely perfect. Sometimes she found herself thinking about the job that was lying ahead of her, worrying that she wasn't ready for it and wouldn't be able to do it properly. Sometimes she couldn't help thinking about Leo and feeling sad. But she tried to edit those thoughts out as much as possible. This wasn't the time to grieve; she'd already done that, and she'd have plenty of chances to do it again. It wasn't the right time to worry about her job, either. This was a time just to enjoy herself, and Josh, and see how good life could be for them when they just slowed down and savored it a little, together.

She wasn't the only one who had reasons to worry or grieve, of course. Sometimes, when Josh was quiet, she could see a shadow cross his face and knew he was either thinking about his job, or about Leo, or both. It was hardly surprising: Leo's death had been far harder on Josh than on her, the job he was going to was far more challenging and difficult than hers would ever be, and there wasn't really much she could do about either one, except touch his arm or squeeze his hand a little, to let him know she saw and understood and was there if he wanted to talk.

He didn't want to, though: whenever she did that, he'd blink a little, or shake his head as if to clear it, and put a smile on his face and start talking about what she wanted to do next. It was obvious that he wasn't feeling inclined to open up any more than he already had about how Leo's death was making him feel, and if there was anything in particular that was worrying him about the job—anything beyond the sheer size and weight of it, which no amount of talking was ever going to reduce—he didn't want to discuss it.

Part of her was a little sad that he wasn't willing to be more open with her, but she wasn't really surprised: Josh had never been inclined to talk much about his feelings, and she had always known what he was thinking most of the time anyway, just as she did now. Another part of her was relieved. She felt a little guilty about that, but she couldn't help it: she just wanted to enjoy this time together, and not have to give any of it up to anything else, especially not to the work that she knew would dominate his thoughts and absorb most or all of his time again when they went back to D.C.

There were days when she found herself wishing they never had to go back to D.C. But then she'd catch herself and remember that she didn't want to become that woman again. She had a challenging, important, and well-paid job waiting for her there; she wasn't going to let herself slip back into being the kind of woman who could be made happy just by spending time with a man, even if that time was being spent in a particularly lovely place, and even if the man was being astonishingly obliging in almost every way.

There was something about that obligingness that she found a little unsettling, actually. It didn't seem entirely natural, especially from Josh. She'd never known him to be like that; she couldn't help feeling sometimes, the way she had on the plane, as if she were on the receiving end of a performance: every time she saw that shadow cross his face, and then saw him force a smile when she noticed, the feeling deepened. It was sweet of him, of course, but she couldn't quite shake away the thought that he wasn't just covering up his hurt about Leo or his fears about his job, but was acting the whole thing—the whole perfect vacation, perfect lover thing—because it was easier than letting her know what he was really feeling about everything, especially her.

He wanted the sex, of course—she knew that. But she still didn't know whether he wanted anything else from her, anything deeper or more meaningful, anything long-term. He probably didn't know, either, and didn't really want to have to think or talk about it; keeping her happy in every other way might be his way of avoiding the discussion and, in typical Josh-fashion, of allowing himself to feel less guilty about avoiding it. Unless, of course, it was his way of allowing himself feel less guilty about what he _did_ know he was going to say when the moment finally came: "Thanks, Donna, it's been great, but, y'know, the next few years are going to be really busy and this just isn't the right time for me to make a commitment. . . ."

Still, if she sometimes came out of the bathroom in the morning to find Josh on the balcony looking at the newspapers, his brow creased and his mouth set in worried lines, all she had to do was to touch him lightly and bend down to kiss him, and he'd set the papers aside and give himself over to her in whatever way she wanted. And if he sometimes tossed restlessly beside her at night, all she had to do was to reach for him, and he'd wake and make love to her again and then fall asleep more deeply. In the morning they would make love again, and then have coffee together in the sun, and go for another walk, or a swim, or a boat ride, or they'd play tennis, or try to play golf, or go into town to explore, or go dancing, or eat at one of the many restaurants he'd found out about somehow—simple or elegant but always delicious—and paradise would resume.

It all worked very well for the first few days. But as the week began to draw to an end, Donna found it harder to feel satisfied by all the fun things they were doing, harder and harder to put her doubts and fears aside. She wanted to know where this was all going. She _needed_ to know. She'd given Josh too much time, she thought; she couldn't wait another three weeks to find out what he was really thinking. But it was so hard to bring the subject up; if it didn't go well, the trip would be ruined, and they'd have to sweat out the end of it in the most awkward discomfort with each other. The thought of that was even more miserable than the doubting, fearful thoughts that were pressing in on her more and more insistently, so she kept putting the conversation off. "The last night," she thought. "If he hasn't said anything by the last night, I'll bring it up."

That was reasonable, she thought. She'd given him four weeks, but that was when she'd thought they'd be on his Washington schedule; one week of being together twenty-four hours a day should have given Josh all the time he needed to come to some kind of decision, shouldn't it? She wasn't expecting the moon, after all. Not a proposal, or a fancy ring, or anything like that. Just some sort of discussion about where they'd been and where he saw this going. Just something to tell her that this was a relationship he was willing to invest something in, that it _might_ be the one he would want to commit to someday.


	8. Chapter 8

On their second-to-last night, Donna woke to find the bed beside her empty. It wasn't the first time that had happened, but this time, when she called his name softly, he didn't come back. She called again, but there was still no answer. She lay there for a while, wondering where he was and what he was doing, before she finally woke up enough to make herself get out of bed and look. He wasn't on the balcony, as she'd half expected. Then she noticed that the bathroom door was closed, and a faint line of light was showing underneath it. She tapped on it gently.

There was a pause. Then, after a moment, Josh's voice, saying, "Sorry. I'll be out in a minute."

"Are you all right, Josh?" she asked, opening the door a crack to check up on him. She was surprised to find him dressed in his boxers and sitting on the floor. He had a newspaper beside him, and a pad of paper, but he wasn't looking at either one of them; his eyes were shut, and his head tipped back against the wall. In spite of his tan he looked pale, but that might have been just the bright light in the bathroom, and all that white marble tile.

"Josh!" she exclaimed. "What on earth are you doing? Are you all right?"

"I'm sorry," he said, opening his eyes. He looked startled. "I was—working. I—just wanted to get some stuff I'd been thinking about down on paper, so I wouldn't forget it." He gestured to the pad of paper—which seemed to have only a word or two written on it.

"You don't seem to have had much to write down," she pointed out. "And there's a desk in the room, Josh, a very handsome one. I think it's an antique."

He flushed a bit.

"I just couldn't sleep," he said. "And I didn't want to disturb you. I thought I wouldn't wake you if I worked for a while in here."

That was sweet, and made her smile.

"Come on," she said, "You need your sleep. This is supposed to be a vacation."

He smiled back.

"Sorry," he said again, and stood up. He was moving stiffly, she noticed, and winced a bit when he bent over to gather up the newspaper and his notepad.

"Are you all right?" she asked again anxiously, seeing the expression that flitted across his face when he had to move. "You shouldn't have been sitting on the floor like that, Josh."

"I'm fine," he said, following her back to bed, and dropping the papers on the floor beside it. She started to rub his back.

"Where does it hurt?"

"It's fine. Don't worry about it. Here, I need to be doing that to you, too."

They rubbed each other's backs for a little while. Side-by-side wasn't the best position for giving a massage, but Donna was too tired and his hands on her back felt too nice for her to really want to sit up and do it properly. It was all she could do to keep her hands moving at all. After a while, though, she thought of something she should have said right away.

"You don't have to do that, you know," she said sleepily, stifling a yawn.

"Do what? Rub your back? Of course I do; I want to." His voice was as sleepy as hers.

"Work in the bathroom, at night. If you need to get something done, you can do it. At the desk. During the day."

"But there's other stuff I have to do during the day," he mumbled. He sounded as if he was already halfway asleep, but he pressed his mouth to her shoulder and kissed it.

"You don't _have_ to," she said, just a little sharply.

"Want to," he corrected, sleepily. He kissed her shoulder again, then moved his lips down and kissed a little lower, and then a third time, a little lower still. But before he actually reached her breast, he had fallen asleep.

Donna lay very still, feeling his heart beating against hers, and wondering what it all meant: what the difference between "have to" and "want to" was, and whether Josh really had any idea why he was doing all this, or what he wanted from her at all.


	9. Chapter 9

The next morning she slept in much later than usual. She woke to find Josh leaning on his elbow, looking down at her.

"So," he said, when he saw her eyes flutter open. He started to trace slow, lazy circles on her stomach with a finger. Over his shoulder light and shadows were dancing on the ceiling and the big fan was turning and stirring up a gentle breeze, just as slowly and lazily.

"So," she said back. His eyes looked dark and serious, but his finger was teasing, almost tickling her. She closed her eyes again so she concentrate on the sensation, and not on the look in his eyes.

"So," he said again. "So, so, so. . . ."

"So what, Josh?" she murmured. "Ooo, that feels so good. . . ."

"So," he said, bending over so she could feel his breath warm on her face. He opened his hand and began to stroke her gently with the whole of it, working slowly downwards.

"Articulate, aren't we, this morning?"

"Always," he said, and she could hear a little laugh in his voice now, and opened her eyes to see them smiling down at her warmly.

"Your staff might not agree with you."

"Do you really want them to?" He brought his mouth down to join his hand, which was creeping down into places that made it hard for her to go on speaking.

"No. Oh, no. Oh—"

"It can be our little secret, then."

"So—it can. So—oh—oh—"

Josh lifted his head for a moment.

"Articulate this morning, aren't we?" he murmured, the laugh in his voice unmistakable now.

Donna didn't bother answering him. She didn't want him wasting any more time talking—at least, not right then.

It was another beautiful morning, another perfect day.


	10. Chapter 10

"So," Josh said, about twelve hours later, when they had almost finished a last dinner in the restaurant she'd chosen, her favorite of the many places they'd tried that week. He pushed his plate back, and was fiddling with his wine glass and looking out the window when he said it. The sun was setting, a huge round red ball going down into a mirror-like sea. The day, like the meal and the vacation, was almost over.

"So," Donna said, picking up her glass and taking another sip. The bottle sat between them, nearly empty.

"We go back tomorrow."

"Yes, we do."

"It's been nice."

She smiled, carefully avoiding letting any of the emotion she was feeling show on her face.

"Yes, it has."

They sat quietly for a couple of minutes, sipping the last of the wine. The busboy came and cleared away the plates, and the waiter brought their coffees.

"Donna," Josh said, when they were alone again, "when we go back—" He stopped, and looked down at his coffee-cup. His voice sounded strained. Donna felt her throat tighten. She looked studiously at her cup, too.

"Yes?" she asked, hearing a chill creep into her voice, but unable to keep it out. So, she thought, this was it. This was when he was going to give her the speech she'd been dreading: _"It's been nice. You've been great. But when we go back, I'm going to be too busy. . . ."_

Josh cleared his throat.

"When we go back—have you thought— Do you know—What—" He broke off again. She looked up to see him frowning at the table, the coffee pushed aside.

"What _what,_ Josh?" she asked sternly. The suspense was killing her.

"What—you want—to do?"

She shrugged.

"Go to work for the First Lady, of course."

"You're sure? You don't want Assistant Press Secretary? It's a good offer, you know—you'd be in the thick of things, you'd be helping to shape our message, and you'd get to take some of the briefings for Lou, which would give you experience and exposure. And then, if she leaves, you'd be all set to move up. . . ."

She raised her eyebrows at that, surprised the possibility had occurred to him, but shook her head.

"No, Josh, I told you. I can't sleep with you and work for you, too. And I don't think it would be so good to be working for you if we're not together, either. So, either way, I don't think I should take that job."

He nodded.

"I know," he said, quietly. "I just wanted to make sure you knew you had a choice."

"Thank you." She meant it. "This will be a better job for me, I think, though. It will be nice to be in charge of something, for once."

A shadow crossed his face, and he shut his eyes.

"Yeah," he said, after a moment. "I know."

They sat quietly again for another minute or two. Then Josh said, suddenly, "That wasn't what I meant, though."

"What?"

"That wasn't what I meant, when I asked if you knew what you wanted to do when we get back. I wasn't asking about the job."

"Oh," Donna said, surprised. "What—did you mean?"

"I meant, had you thought any more about what you wanted to do about—this?" And he waved his hand across the table, indicating the two of them.

Donna looked back at him steadily. She was surprised he'd brought it up, but she wasn't about to let him make her go first on this one.

"What do _you_ want to do, Josh?" she asked.

He took a deep breath, and looked down at his glass again.

"This has been a great week," he said. "It's been—well, great. I haven't done anything like this in years. Or ever, really—not like this, not for a whole week, and not—not with someone—well, you know. . . ." His voice trailed away self-consciously. Donna raised an eyebrow, doing her best to look cool and collected, but wondering where, exactly, he was taking this. He cleared his throat and tried again.

"Everyone's been telling me I don't have a life," he said, "and it's true, I don't. I mean, I didn't. It's been amazing, just having a week like this to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it. But now we've got to go back. And you know what it's going to be like, Donna; it's going to be crazy. It's going to be the hardest job I've ever had, and I'm going to have to work harder than I've ever had to in my life before, because this job matters more than any other job I've ever had. I have no idea how I'm going to do it. I'd thought Leo would be there to help me, but. . . ."

His voice choked a little and he blinked, hard, and, upset as she was at what she thought he was about to say, Donna couldn't help reaching across the table and touching his hand. He turned it over and wrapped his fingers around hers and squeezed them, hard.

"So," he said, when he'd got control of his voice again, "so, I don't know what kind of life I'm going to be able to have, you know? It's not going to be like this, that's for sure." He glanced towards the beach, where the surf was rolling in lazily, and then looked back at her. His eyes were as dark and serious as they had been that morning when she woke up, and she wondered whether this inevitable conversation was what he'd been thinking about then. She was suddenly, fiercely glad that he'd made love to her one more time instead.

"And maybe I should just quit, but. . . ."

Donna squeezed her eyes shut, but nodded. Josh could never do that, she knew. Politics was his life. She couldn't imagine him stepping down to do something less difficult; couldn't imagine him backing away from the challenge and the thrill of being at the heart of things, giving them his all. She'd always known that about him, and had always known, really, that he couldn't possibly find time to fit anything else into that life, even her.

"No," she said, softly. "No, you can't do that. Of course you can't do that."

He squeezed her hand more tightly.

"You understand?" he said. "You do understand?"

She nodded, unable to look up at him but holding onto his hand for dear life. She'd tried so hard to keep herself from showing what she felt for him so this moment, if it came, wouldn't be so painful, but now that it was here she couldn't stop herself from clinging to him as if that would somehow keep him from leaving her.

"Thank you," he whispered. A long minute passed. Donna stared down at the table, willing herself not to cry. And then, to her astonishment, he said,

"But I want to try to make this work, Donna. I do want to make it work. I just don't know how to do it, you know?"

She lifted her eyes, stunned.

"You—want this to work?"

He nodded, looking miserable.

"I don't know if I can. I'm no good at this sort of thing, Donna, you know that. But I want to try. I mean, if—if you do. . . ."

She felt the heat flush over her face, and a smile that was far broader and brighter than she really wanted him to see.

"Trying sounds good," she said, struggling to keep some composure in her voice, at least.

"It does?" He sounded so surprised, she laughed.

"Yes, Josh, trying sounds like a pretty good idea to me."

"But how?" he said, anxiously. "How do we make it work?"

She sat back then, disentangled her fingers from his, picked up her coffee cup, and took a steadying sip. Her mind was whirling with relief and happiness and the realization that here, at last, was her opportunity to say all the things she'd been thinking all this time, all the things Louisa had helped her see would be essential in any relationship she might eventually want to have.

"Well," she said, taking another sip and smiling a little over the cup at him, "for starters, it might be a good idea if we saw each other every now and again."

That made him smile, too.

"That sounds like a very good idea."

"But you're going to be very busy, as you've said. So, how are we going to do that?" She was dodging, wanting it to come from him, and yet she was surprised when it actually did.

"I was thinking," Josh started, hesitantly.

"Yes?"

"I was thinking, maybe, since we're not going to be seeing each other much during the day anymore. . . ."

"Yes, Josh?"

"I was thinking, maybe . . . we should try . . ."

"Yes, Josh?"

"You know, actually—sleeping together?"

Donna laughed a little at that.

"That would be a necessary part of making things work, yes."

"I mean, not just for sex, but, you know—all the time."

"Every night?"

"Every night."

"We could do that, I suppose."

"We could?"

"I don't see why not."

Josh sat back, looking relieved. He reached out across the table and put his hand over hers. She turned her hand up, and he twisted his fingers through hers. She shivered a little at his touch; it felt so good, so right, so. . . .

"It might be easier if we made some adjustments in other areas of our lives," he said.

Donna laughed again.

"Such as?"

"Such as, if we were actually, you know, sharing a place."

"You mean, living together?"

He bit his lip and nodded, his eyes searching hers questioningly.

She smiled, and looked down at their hands, clasped together. He was squeezing tightly again; it almost hurt, with his fingers twisted through hers like that.

"That might make things easier," she agreed. He sighed, and relaxed his grip just a little.

"It's a good idea?"

"It sounds like a good idea."

He beamed at her then, showing all his dimples. She beamed back, feeling as if a huge load had just been lifted off her chest, and she could breathe freely again. He looked as if he felt the same way.

"At my place?" he asked.

"Why not mine?" She was just teasing; she didn't want to live in her apartment, if Josh's was a possibility.

"Because mine is in a better neighborhood, and nicer, and you've always liked it better."

Donna tipped her head to the side, pretending to consider that.

"All right," she said at last, with a smile. "But you'll have to make room for some of my stuff."

"Just some?" he asked, grinning.

"Just some," she said. "I don't want to give up my apartment just yet."

His face fell a little, the dimples vanishing. He looked at her cautiously.

"Why—?" he began, and then broke off.

"I'll sublet it for six months, Josh. If things aren't working out by then, I'll move back again."

That was important. Moving in together was a step forward—a big step—but it wasn't a full commitment. And she still didn't know yet whether he'd be able to give her everything else she needed.

He looked out the window. It was a minute before he looked back and answered.

"Okay," he said, quietly. She couldn't tell from his voice what he was thinking.

"Okay?" she echoed, questioningly.

He looked back at her.

"Okay," he said again, and smiled a little then. She smiled back. They sat for a minute, saying nothing, just holding hands across the table and smiling and thinking about the fact that they were going to be living together. But after a minute Donna looked down at their joined hands, and when she looked up, she wasn't smiling anymore.

"But Josh—"

"Yes, Donna?"

"Just sharing an apartment isn't all it's going to take to make things work, you know."

His smile faded too.

"Yeah," he said, "I know."

"I know you're going to be very busy."

"Yeah," he said again. "I really am."

"And I understand that, Josh. It's okay; I can deal with that."

"Jenny couldn't," he said, a touch of bitterness in his voice.

"I'm not Jenny, Josh. Jenny never told Leo what she wanted; she just let it all build up until she couldn't take it anymore, and it broke them. I'm not going to be like that."

He nodded, looking at her questioningly.

"That's good," he said. "But—what _do_ you want? Can you tell me? Do you know?"

She did know. She'd given it a lot of thought over the past year, talked about it a lot with her therapist, and with herself. Once the answer would just have been, "You," even if she'd never have said it out loud, but it wasn't the answer anymore. She looked down at the tablecloth, frowning a little, looking for the words she needed.

"I need," she began, and paused. This was so important; she had to get it right.

"I need to have some sort of life together," she started, taking an indirect route to the main point. "I need you to come home at night whenever you can, as early as you can. I'll understand when you can't, but as much as you can, I need you to keep hours that will let us spend a little time together. I know how important this job is, Josh, but I'm going to need to know that being with me is important to you, too, that you'll put that first—put me first—when you honestly can."

He squeezed her hand again.

"It is," he whispered. "It will be. I want that, too."

"If you can't make it back, I need you to let me know. Call me. Or have Margaret call me. But don't just leave me hanging, please."

She would understand if he slipped up sometimes; she expected it. But she wanted the principle established that he'd try not to do that.

"I will," he said. "Really, Donna. I promise."

She looked up at him for a moment, and saw him watching her intently, his eyes very bright. She dropped her eyes again, took her hand out of his, and took a deep breath.

"But—I'm going to need more than that, Josh," she started, hesitantly. She could hear the tension in her voice, feel her hands pressing together in her lap. She took another deep breath and stretched them out on her legs, willing herself to relax. Josh was looking at her searchingly, a worried expression on his face.

"What, Donna?" he asked, quietly, when she didn't go on right away. She bit her lip. Why was this so hard to say?

"I need—I'm going to need—to know—" She stopped, and cleared her throat. In spite of herself, her hands were twisting together again in her lap. She kept her eyes fixed on them, and hated herself for not being able to look up.

"To know what, Donna?" Josh's voice was gentle and steady; it steadied her. She took another deep breath, and looked up to see his eyes watching her, warm and tender and concerned.

"That you—that you respect me." He blinked, looking startled. She pressed on. "That you take me seriously, Josh."

"Of course I take you seriously, Donna!" He sounded almost indignant. "How could you possibly think—"

"You know how I could think it, Josh. And I need to know it won't be like that anymore. That—that I won't be just your assistant to you anymore."

There, she had said it. She was shaking inside, but she had said it, and her voice had stayed surprisingly steady while she did. Louisa would be proud of her, she thought, fleetingly, and perhaps C.J., too, and Kate Harper. She looked up and saw that his eyes had gone very wide.

"You're not," he stammered, "I do—" He looked completely flummoxed. "I—you—

Donna, you never were _just _my assistant to me."

She flushed, and looked back at him squarely.

"But Josh," she said, determined to have this out once and for all, "I don't want to be your assistant anymore _at all._"

He blinked, and swallowed, and this time he was the one to drop his eyes and start fiddling with his napkin. After a minute he said, huskily, "Was it really that bad?"

"It got to be."

He bit his lip, hard. There was a long pause. Then he said, quietly, "I'm sorry. I didn't know. I—I'm sorry, Donna. I meant to be—I didn't mean—I'm sorry I was such a lousy boss."

This wasn't the time, she thought, to go into the list of grievances she'd built up before she left what had once been her dream job. That was history now; she could let it go. So she just said,

"I know. And you weren't, not at first, and not always. But—if I'm going to live with you, Josh, I need to be your partner, not your assistant. And I need you to be _my_ partner, not my boss."

His face twisted.

"I'm sorry," he said, again. "I didn't think I'd been—I didn't know you thought I still—"

"I don't, Josh. You haven't been. I just don't want that to change. I don't want us to slip back into the way we used to be."

He nodded. She reached across the table and put her hand over his again. He turned his over and squeezed hers until it hurt.

"It won't," he said. "We won't. I promise."

"I just want to know that you take me seriously, Josh."

"I do," he said, earnestly. "I do. And I will."

She smiled then, and the waiter came with the bill, and afterwards they skipped the taxi and walked back to their hotel along the beach, hand in hand, a huge, romantic moon hanging before them in the velvety darkness of the sky, the water splashing seductively around their ankles and the sand warm and yielding under their feet. There was no question about what they would do when they got back to their room.

Josh was quiet, but Donna didn't mind; she was happy just to walk along holding his hand, and didn't need any more words now. They had had their talk, and she had said all the things she'd needed to say, and Josh had been all right with it. He hadn't wanted to break up with her after all. They were going to live together, and she had set out the terms, and he had agreed to all of them. The next six months wouldn't be paradise, of course—she wasn't expecting that—but for the first time since this whole thing had begun she felt a real sense of conviction that it was all going to work out.

How right Louisa had been. She hadn't known anything about Donna becoming involved with Josh, of course, but she had helped Donna learn to let her needs be known and to be prepared to walk away if they weren't met, and that had made all the difference. If only, Donna thought for a fleeting moment, she had learned years ago how to get what she wanted. She had been so foolish then, so naive and trusting. C.J. had opened her eyes to that. . . . But there was no point in going there. She had learned her lesson, and everything was so much better because of it. She had stood up for herself and what she wanted, and now she was going to have it, and that was all that mattered.


	11. Chapter 11

"So," Louisa said, "you moved in with him?"

"Yes," Donna said. "When we got back. I sublet my apartment for six more months."

"Did you let the apartment with your things in it, or move them over?"

"I'd left my furniture in it when I let it during the campaign. I just extended the lease, and brought what I wanted of the smaller stuff out of storage. Josh's place isn't all that big."

"That's not quite the same thing as moving in with all your things, is it?"

"No, it isn't."

"You didn't make any of those big decisions—who throws out what to fit it all in?"

"No, I guess not. He cleared out the bathroom cabinet for me, though, and a lot of the closet space, and half the drawers. And I brought my bedding and towels and my teapot and favorite mugs, my grandmother's afghan, some books and CDs, things like that."

Louisa nodded. Moving in was a big step; Donna had been wise, she thought, not to commit herself too far. She might have postponed some important arguments about taste and space and rights to possessions, but she'd left herself free to go if things weren't working out—when things didn't work out. Louisa was a great believer in back-up plans and escape routes for women, and—after discovering that, for thirteen of their fifteen years of marriage, her Army-doctor husband had been carrying on with one of his pretty nurses after another—no longer much of a believer in any kind of commitment between the sexes. Men were just too selfish and undependable; women had to expect that, and learn to look out for themselves.

But you could never convince a woman of that, until she had found it out for herself. All you could do was insist on the safety-net: the well-paid job, the separate bank account, the ability to jump free when the time came and survive it. Condoms were important, too; you never knew what the man might be doing on the side. She'd been lucky—Rick, after all, had been a doctor—but plenty of women weren't.

The need to protect yourself physically during sex even in marriage made the whole question of children difficult—but then, children _were_ difficult, any way you looked at it. Very sweet at times, when they were younger, but that wore off so quickly, and then you had to live with them for ten or twelve more years. . . . Louisa often envied her friends who had remained unmarried and childless. But that, too, was something she'd found it was impossible to convince a woman of until she'd learned it for herself.

Louisa did know families who seemed happy. But they were just disasters waiting to happen, like hers.

"Had he lived with anyone before?" she asked, since she knew better than to share what she was thinking with the woman in front of her. All she could do was keep her talking, until she was ready to tell Louisa what had happened.

That something had happened was obvious enough: the man had let her down somehow already. It had been inevitable, but that didn't make it any less painful, Louisa knew. Fortunately Donna had been sensible and had kept her options open. She would be able to move back to her own apartment and carry on with her work in the high-profile job this man had done his best to keep her out of. They always liked it better when you were dependent; it meant they could have their cake and eat it, too.

"No. No, I was the first, actually. I mean, he's had girlfriends who left stuff there before, of course, and I'm sure he's left his stuff at their places, but not this level of stuff. He's always had his own place, and they've had theirs."

Of course, some men preferred to avoid commitment altogether. It was selfish of them, but it made things easier, really, as long as the woman understood what was happening and could deal with it. The trouble always came about when she couldn't, when she gave her heart away and thought he had, too. . . .

"How did he feel about having your things there? It's a big change for a man who's used to living alone."

Probably that was where the trouble had come from; he hadn't really wanted Donna in his space—the space he'd been used to having to himself all those years—at all. He might have accepted it as what he had to do to get her to go on having sex with him, but when push came to shove. . . .

"He was pretty good about it. I was surprised, I'd thought it would bother him, even though he wanted me there, but he had the bathroom all ready for me when I brought my stuff over, and the bedroom closet and drawers, like I said. He joked about not being able to find his razor in the morning, with all my makeup and conditioners and things in the bathroom cabinet, but it was just joking—he really didn't seem to mind at all."

"So you thought it was going well?"

"It was. It was going really well. At first. . . ."

Didn't it always, Louisa thought to herself. At first.

oooooo

It did go well at first. From the moment Donna drove up to Josh's doorstep, her car overflowing with sheets and blankets and afghans and teapots and the contents of her considerable wardrobe, the big box of bath essentials she had so missed during the campaign, and all the other odds and ends she considered necessary to a comfortable home, it went surprisingly well. Josh met her on the doorstep, grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet, and helped her carry it all inside.

"Is this all?" he asked her, when the car was finally empty.

"Sarcasm will get you nowhere."

"That wasn't sarcasm. I'm amazed—I'd expected a lot more than this."

"I told you I was leaving the furniture, Josh."

"But you have a lot more stuff than this. All your books and plants and china thingies, and that old, battered chest you're so proud of, and—"

"That's an antique, Josh. It's a hundred years old. It has a right to be battered!"

"I know." He actually smiled at her; he'd always given her a hard time about that old trunk, which was, admittedly, not the finest antique in the world. "But you like it. Where is it? Do you need me to go back and lift it into the car for you?"

"It's okay. I decided it could stay in storage a while longer. We're going to be crowded in here as it is. It's a pretty small apartment, you know."

"I know." He shot her a worried look. "You'd like something bigger, wouldn't you?"

"Well, yes, eventually. But this is fine for now, Josh."

"It is? Really?"

"Of course it is."

"That's good," he said, with obvious relief. "Look, I cleared out part of the closet for you, and half the drawers."

"Wherever did you put it all, Josh?"

He shrugged.

"I gave most of it to Goodwill. I didn't need half that stuff anyway; I just hadn't gotten around to cleaning it out."

She laughed.

"I've been telling you to do that for years," she pointed out.

He grinned, and slipped his arm around her waist.

"You never gave me a good enough reason to do it before," he said. His arms tightened around her as his mouth met hers. They never made it to the bed. Donna didn't even notice, much less protest, when her dress bags and dry-cleaning slipped off the back of the sofa and spilled all over the floor.

oooooo

Eventually, of course, she'd unpacked it all and put it away. He really had created a lot of space for her things in the bedroom, and he'd cleaned out the cabinet over the sink in the bathroom for her, too. "I don't need much room," he'd said, shrugging, when she commented on it. "I knew you'd have about a million pots and potions, so I figured you'd want the space." He kept a corner for a comb and his shaving things and left the rest of the space for her. Which was just as well; she didn't have any trouble filling it. She'd really missed all her "pots and potions," as Josh called them, on the campaign.

She put her toothbrush next to his in the cup beside the sink, and loved the way they looked, nestled together. She loved the way her sheets looked on his bed. She loved the way he looked between her sheets, late at night, or first thing in the morning, if she woke up in time to see him before he slipped out. She loved watching him sip coffee from one of her favorite cups in his kitchen. She loved watching him close his eyes and tip his head back against her grandmother's afghan that she'd draped over the back of his couch in the living room when he was taking a break from the interminable stacks of briefing memos he brought home to work on every night. One night when she was tired—she was having her period—he made her lie down on the couch and tucked the afghan round her, then went and made her some tea and brought it out to her. He sat down beside her and put her feet in his lap and rubbed them while she sipped it, and they both watched the news and talked about what had happened at work that day. She loved that. She loved living with Josh. And he didn't seem to mind living with her too much, either.

She wasn't so sure about her new job at first. Her first priority was obviously to help the First Lady and her children get settled into their new life, but the Party had a budget, and a committeeful of experienced Washington wives who had done this before with the Bartlets and other Democratic presidents, and Donna found that what Helen really needed was someone to help her advocate for her tastes, which were a lot simpler and more child-oriented than most of the Washington wives were expecting. Since the most expensive pieces of furniture Donna had ever owned were her bed and the couch she'd bought at Ikea for $800 eight years before, she felt horribly out of her depth at first, but one of the wives proved to be sympathetic, and Donna quickly realized that she didn't have to become an overnight expert in interior decoration, she just had to find the right person who was. It turned out to be quite a lot of fun in the end, looking over portfolios of decorators' work with Helen, laughing at all the pompous excess, and finally choosing one who seemed able to strike a balance between dignity and comfort. She took the same approach with Helen's wardrobe, putting together a list of design consultants and then hiring one who would do the leg-work for her. By Christmas, Donna was beginning to feel as if she might actually be able to cope. By the time the Inauguration arrived, she was really enjoying herself.

Josh was too busy to go home with her at Christmas. Donna hadn't expected him to, and was secretly relieved that she didn't have to deal with that yet. It was hard enough answering all her family's questions without having to worry about how he was reacting to them and how her family was reacting to his reactions. Not that they weren't happy that he and Donna were together; it was their over-abundance of happiness that Donna would have worried about, especially her mother's. She thought Josh would find it embarrassing; it might even put him off. And she was afraid her mother might start talking about how he'd felt after Gaza again, which would be excruciating. In fact, her mother did try to bring it up once, while they were in the kitchen together and the others had gone out of the room for a minute, but at least he wasn't there to have to hear it, and Donna was able to change the subject quickly.

Later that night, she lay in bed looking at the familiar shadows on the ceiling and wondering why that subject bothered her so much. She'd just finished talking to him—the second time that day. "I miss you," he'd said softly, after she'd told him all about the tree and the presents she'd got and how the big dinner with all her aunts and uncles and cousins had gone. "I miss you, too," she'd whispered back. And she did. Her heart ached with missing him so much, and she'd only been away for two days, and was flying back tomorrow.

After she said good-bye, she held the phone against her chest, watching the shadows dance on the ceiling, and for just a moment her mother's voice flitted into her mind again. "He really loves you, dear. I knew it, when he came all that way to be with you when you were hurt. And afterwards. . . ." "We're just trying it out, Mom," Donna had said, a little sharply, because she hated it when her mother talked like that. He couldn't have loved her then; he couldn't. Because if he had, and she'd—but she couldn't go there. She'd done the right thing; she had to have done the right thing. Look at where it had got her: she was working for the First Lady now; she was the First Lady's Chief of Staff. And they were together; she and Josh were together. She'd be with him tomorrow night. She had to think about that, and not the other. . . .

oooooo

There were high points, of course, and low points. Coming home to Josh after Christmas was one of the high points; he met her at the airport and took her out to dinner that night at a cozy little hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese place in Georgetown she loved. The Inauguration was another high, but a more stressful one: they were both tense, strained to the limit, until the actual moment was over and Matthew Santos had taken his Oath of Office and become the new President of the United States. The balls passed in a whirl of relief, confusion, delight, and sore feet. She didn't get to dance much with Josh, but she didn't really mind: they both had a lot of other things to think about, with each of them responsible for one of the principal stars putting on a top performance.

The next night she put on one of her favorite CD's and pushed the furniture back, and they danced in the living room of his apartment, a lot more intimately than they'd been able to in public the night before. So intimately that Donna said afterwards she wasn't really sure it counted as dancing. Josh just raised an eyebrow and asked who was counting.

"You were," she pointed out.

"I had to keep track," he protested. "For your sake, to make sure you got enough—"

"For your ego's sake, more like," Donna said, swatting him lightly. "Honestly, you turn everything into a competition, even when there's nobody to compete against."

"Not nobody," Josh said, growling a little. "There's a whole world of men out there who—"

"Are you suggesting," Donna said, sternly, putting a hand over his mouth to cut him off, "that I've slept with a whole world of men?"

Josh flushed then.

"No, of course not," he said, pulling her hand away and squeezing it in his own. "But—"

"Be careful, Josh," Donna said, still in a warning tone of voice, though her eyes were dancing. "Be very careful."

"I was going to say," he went on, firmly, "that there's a whole world of men out there you could have slept with any time you wanted to, and still could, so naturally I have to make sure that you don't want to."

Donna felt the heat steal into her own face, too.

"You're doing a pretty good job," she said, softly. "I couldn't ask for anything better."

He brought her hand up to his mouth, then, and kissed her fingers gently. "I couldn't, either," he murmured, and they went on to add another number or two to the count.

So everything was going very well, in spite of the long hours Josh had to put in, and the stresses of his new job. He _was_ stressed—she could tell that—but he seemed to have everything well under control; he'd relax once he got more comfortable in the job. At least he was keeping something like regular hours: he'd kept his word, and tried to leave work in time to have dinner with her most nights.

It was a fairly late dinner, but Donna didn't mind that. She'd make herself some tea and work in her office until he called to say he was ready to leave. Her job was a lot less demanding than his, but there was still plenty for her to do if she wanted to, and she was nervous enough about getting things right that she did want to. Besides, she liked going home with him. They'd talk about their day in the car, and while they were cooking dinner. She had a filebox full of recipes that didn't take very long to make, and he actually seemed to enjoy making them with her. If he'd had a very long day or had a lot of work to get through still, they'd sometimes stop and pick up take-out, instead.

Donna was relieved that they seemed to have negotiated the dinner pitfall without ever having really talked about it: she had half-thought that Josh would expect her to do all the cooking on her own, something she was determined not to do. She knew too many women who came home from their jobs and had to cook dinner every night, while the men got another hour's work in—or worse, watched t.v. But Josh had come into the kitchen with her that first night and started cutting things up for a stir-fry as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and they'd never had to argue about it at all. It wasn't what she'd been expecting, but she certainly wasn't going to complain. Perhaps he really had understood what she was saying, that last night in Barbados, when she'd told him she didn't want to have to act like his assistant anymore. Or perhaps he just liked having something to think about besides work, and it helped him unwind.

Of course, nothing could be perfect. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—he had to call and say he couldn't make it back for dinner. And he always brought a stack of files and briefing memos home with him, and holed up with them for a couple of hours after they ate. He was usually up before she was, too, even though she liked to think of herself as an early riser. Donna would have loved more languid mornings, lying in bed together talking and making love, but you couldn't have everything, especially when the man you were with was the President's Chief of Staff.

They tried to get at least one morning like that on the weekend, usually Sunday. It helped that the President was a family man and a church-goer, who had roped off Sunday mornings as sacrosanct unless there was an absolute national or international emergency. The President tried to keep Sunday afternoons for his wife and children, too, which meant that some of the time, at least, Josh was able to spend with Donna. They'd cook brunch together, or walk around Georgetown and get something to eat at one of the many little upscale cafes, before he had to head back in to the office, or hole up at home with his files and his cell phone. Donna loved that time together—even the presence of the Secret Service agents who accompanied Josh and, to her surprise, Donna herself everywhere ("They say they can't protect me if they can't protect you, Donna") couldn't spoil her delight in it, and she was looking forward to getting more of it when Josh felt more in control of the job and more comfortable delegating some of the responsibilities to Sam and the rest of the senior staff.

So, while it wasn't paradise, life in those first few months together was closer to it than Donna would ever have imagined possible just a short while before. And then the invitation came.

oooooo


	12. Chapter 12

Note: I've taken the story a bit off-canon here, giving Donna more time in hospital—both in Germany and D.C.—than the show allowed her. It just seemed too improbable their way. Otherwise, I've tried to fit this story pretty closely to what we see on the show, where there's something to fit it to.

And I'd like to acknowledge again my indebtedness to Shelley, Jen Wilson, and Sally Reeve for some of the events in this section. My excuse is that they all did such a good job writing about them that I started to think of them as almost canon—fanon, anyway. I hope by the end of the story you'll think I've done something a bit different with them, but right now, I know, these things will sound pretty unoriginal.

oooooo

It was a very handsome invitation, printed on heavy rag stock, with the United Nations and the State Department seals on the outside, and a black and white photograph of two children kicking a soccer ball on a dusty-looking field inside. It was addressed to Ms. Donna Moss and Guest, inviting them to attend the gala opening of an exhibition of photographs at the U.N. on the first Friday in April.

Donna stared at it for a long time. When she put it down, her hand was shaking a little. She wondered why. It wasn't as if this should have come as a surprise. She'd known all about it; she should have been expecting it. But a few months can change everything, and they had, and she wasn't.

The photographer whose work was being shown was Colin Ayres. The exhibit had been organized by the State Department in conjunction with the U.N., as part of the U.N.'s year-long celebration of fifty years of peacekeeping. State had decided to use the occasion to showcase the U.S.'s involvement with peacekeeping in Gaza. The photographs were a before-and-after study of the disputed territory: before and after the peace accord President Bartlet had brokered at Camp David. Before and after the explosion that had killed two United States Congressmen and one U.S. Navy Admiral, and had changed forever the life of one White House assistant, Donna Moss.

Colin had called her the previous summer, not long after the convention, when she was still working for the Vice President and didn't really have very much to do anymore, since his campaign was over. Colin had explained that he was putting together an exhibit for the U.N. and State, and he wanted to include a section on the conditions in Gaza before the peace accord that President Bartlet had negotiated and the U.N. had undertaken to enforce. He had plenty of pictures, of course, but some of the ones he thought would be most effective had Donna in them, and he wondered if she'd mind. There were three or four that he'd taken the day he'd shown her "the real Gaza"; her face was visible, but she was really just a figure off to the side; he couldn't imagine that she'd find anything to object to. But he wanted to make sure. And there was something else. . .

"You wrote a lot, while you were there. On your computer. Using my internet hook-up."

"I remember," Donna said, her voice a little shaky.

"Dispatches, you said. To your boss, back in Washington."

"Yes," she said, and this time her voice wasn't as shaky. It was the anger she suddenly felt that steadied it. Josh, who hadn't wanted to hire her for his campaign. . . .

"I wondered if you still had those emails? Or, if you don't, if you'd be willing to try to recreate some of what you were thinking then?"

"What—I was thinking?"

"That day I showed you around the place. You seemed very struck by it. We need some text to go with the pictures. I could write it myself, of course, but I was thinking it might be more effective if I could get it from someone else, someone without any preconceptions, who was seeing it for the first time. A fresh perspective. An innocent-"

He broke off, and coughed a little, as if aware that Donna might not be flattered at being called innocent. But she recognized the phrase.

"An innocent eye?" she said.

"Something like that."

"I'll—think about it," she said again. "I'll have to think about it."

"Right, sweetheart. Hear from you soon."

And he'd hung up. Donna had thought about it. She'd even talked about it with Louisa. But it hadn't really taken her very long to decide: it gave her a peculiar little jolt of satisfaction to think that her time on that trip might not have been a complete waste, and that those accounts of it that she'd poured so much into might actually do some good in the world after all.

Josh certainly hadn't cared about them. She doubted he'd ever read them; he'd never answered any of them, anyway. And Josh didn't want her to join the Santos campaign. Her job for the Vice President was winding down, but here, at least, was something interesting she could do. So she'd gone back over those old emails, edited them a little, and zipped them up into one big attachment and sent them off to Colin. He'd written back to thank her, and said he'd be sure to send her an invitation to the opening of the show.

And now, months later, here it was, a heavy piece of parchment in Donna's hands. But she wasn't so sure, now, how she felt about it—or, more to the point, how she felt about telling Josh about it. There had been just enough vindictiveness in her thinking when she had shared those emails with Colin to make her uncomfortable now. Josh was almost bound to be jealous. And if he recognized what she'd written, how would he feel about her having shared it with her former lover—with the man who'd been her lover at the very same time she'd been writing to Josh?

They were her emails, she thought defensively, not his, even though they'd been addressed to him. She'd written them, after all—and she'd written them when Josh was her boss, not her lover, and he'd never answered them or given any indication of having ever read them. The fact that he hadn't answered had pretty much proven what C.J. had tried to say that night of the shutdown, and had been part of the reason Donna had known she had to leave her job with him; the fact that she was now the First Lady's Chief of Staff was proof enough that leavinghad been the right thing to do, so Josh couldn't possibly have anything to complain about—but still, there was something about the whole thing that didn't feel quite right now that she and Josh were together. She thought about how she'd feel if Josh made old letters or emails he'd written to her, however unromantically, public—if he'd given them, say, to Amy Gardner to use in some campaign of hers—and she bit the side of her thumb, and pushed the invitation into her briefcase to think about later.

But before she could do much more thinking about it, something else happened that put the problem of having given Colin emails she'd written to Josh entirely out of her mind. About two days after the invitation came, Colin called again. He wanted to know if she'd gotten it. He wanted to urge her to come. But he wanted to talk to her about something first. He was in Washington, talking to his contact at State and making some final decisions about the pictures he'd be hanging in New York. He knew she must be busy these days, but was there any chance she could join him for a drink that night? Or tomorrow sometime? As soon as possible, if she didn't mind. Thursday lunch? At the Hawk and Dove? Yes, he knew where that was; he'd been to D.C. a few times before. Thanks, love. He'd see her then. And yes, he'd expected a lovely woman like her would be seeing someone; that wasn't what this was about at all; his intentions were pure, perfectly pure. . . .

His voice was as breezy and light as ever, but under the surface, Donna thought she could detect something else—something that, if it hadn't seemed so improbable, she would almost have called anxiety. But Colin Ayres was just about the least nervous man she'd ever met, and how could the prospect of a talk with Donna possibly be enough to make him that way?

oooooo

"Josh?"

"Yeah?"

"Colin called me today."

"Colin?" His voice was abstracted, his mind still deep in the briefing papers spread out in front of him.

"Colin Ayres."

"Colin _Ayres_?" Josh's voice sharpened suddenly. "That Irish wanker you were with in—in—"

"In Gaza. Yes, Josh—that Colin Ayres."

"What the hell did _he_ want?"

"To see me."

"I'll bet he did."

"Is that so surprising?"

Josh glowered at her.

"No, it's not surprising at all. Of course he wants to see you. You're not going to oblige, are you?"

"I'd like to see him."

"You want to go on a date with your ex-boyfriend?"

"Just for a drink, Josh, not a _date._ And he was never my boyfriend. He was a guy I met on a trip and slept with a couple of times. It didn't mean anything. You don't have to worry."

"I'm not worried."

"Then why are you being such a grouch about him calling me up and wanting to see me?"

"I'm not. I just—" Josh stopped, pushed a hand through his hair, and sighed. "Okay, maybe I am. I don't like him very much, that's all."

"You don't know him."

"I know him well enough. He's a pain in the ass, and he's anti-Israel and probably anti-Semitic, too. And he was your boyfriend, Donna! You can't expect me to be thrilled about one of your old boyfriends calling you up for a date. That's unreasonable."

"Honestly, Josh, you're being ridiculous. I told you—he wasn't my boyfriend, and it's not a _date._ He just wants to see me about something."

"What?"

Donna bit her lip to stop herself from snapping that it was none of his business. She could hardly blame him for wanting to know. She knew she'd feel the same if one of his old girlfriends had called him up and wanted to go out to lunch, though Colin hardly qualified as a boyfriend—more like a one-night stand. But still. . . .

"I don't know. He didn't say. Just that he wanted to see me, and there was something he wanted to talk to me about. Nothing romantic. I told him I was seeing someone, and he made it very clear that that wasn't what he was after at all."

"Well, what do you think he _is_ after?"

"I don't know." She still hadn't told him about the gallery show; this didn't seem like the best moment to introduce it. And she didn't know whether what Colin wanted to talk about had anything to do with the show or not.

"Is he trying to get to the First Lady?"

"I don't think so. I don't know what it is, but I promise you, Josh, he didn't sound amorous at all."

"Better not."

"I'm not interested in Colin that way, Josh. But I'd like to see him again, and I'd like to hear what he's got to say."

Josh sighed.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

"Really?"

"Of course, Donna. You're a grown-up; you can do what you want. You don't have to ask my permission."

"I wasn't planning to. I just wanted to tell you what I was doing, so you wouldn't go all funny about it and think I was sneaking off to see an old boyfriend behind your back."

"So you admit he was a boyfriend?"

"_Josh!_"

"Sorry."

"You don't really think I'm going to get something on with Colin, do you, Josh? While I'm living with you? That's fairly insulting to me, you know; you must think I'm some kind of slut."

Josh looked taken aback.

"God, Donna, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that at all. I'd never—I'm sorry. Really. Go ahead, see him if you want to. Of course I don't think about you like that. I never would. I'm sorry."

"Really?"

"Really."

"You really don't mind my going?"

"I'll live with it. But if he brings you flowers. . . ."

"He's not going to bring me flowers, Josh."

"How do you know?"

"It wasn't like that then, and it's certainly not like that now."

"He brought you flowers in the hospital." Josh's voice was suddenly a low growl.

"He did?"

"You don't remember?"

"I was pretty drugged up, Josh. I don't remember all that much."

Josh looked at her strangely.

"You don't remember that? " he said. "You seemed pretty happy about it at the time. I thought. . . ."

"He brought me flowers?"

"Yeah, and he kissed you when he gave them to you, a great, big, smoochy kiss. So it _was_ like that."

"How charming."

"You seemed to think so."

"Well, you've got to admit, Josh, that _was_ charming—coming all that way and bringing me flowers, when we hardly knew each other."

"Oh, great," Josh muttered. "And I had to remind you."

"It doesn't matter now, Josh. I'm not interested in Colin, I told you. I promise. You don't have anything to worry about."

Josh scuffed at the carpet with his foot.

"I brought you flowers, too," he said, his voice low and husky.

"You did?"

"Yeah, well—you never got them."

"I didn't? Why not?"

Josh shrugged. He was looking at his foot, which was still pushing back and forth on the carpet, as if he wanted to rub a hole in it.

"I—um, I dropped them."

"You _dropped _them? Oh, Josh." Donna couldn't help laughing. "You really _are_ a klutz sometimes! How did you ever do that? Why didn't you buy me some more?"

Josh was biting his lip.

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"I don't know. Everything was so crazy, there wasn't time. And then everyone was sending you flowers, and you couldn't have them in the ICU, and your mother was taking them away in armfuls, and then I had to go back. . . ." His voice trailed away.

"You could have sent some when I came home," she said, in a teasing voice.

She'd always wondered why he hadn't. He'd come to see her, of course, in Germany—which really had been good of him, even if Leo had sent him and even if her mother _had_ gone and blown it all out of proportion afterwards—and at the rehab hospital in D.C., where he'd driven her crazy by his incessant nagging about when she was going to be ready to come back to work for him. He'd got her rooms bumped up to private ones, and dealt with the insurance about it for her—somehow he must have persuaded them to pay, because she'd never seen a bill for any of it, thank God; at least that had been one nightmare she hadn't had to cope with.

And he'd helped her with the wheelchair when she did come back to work, but that had been self-interest: it had got her back there a whole lot earlier than if he'd had to wait until she didn't need one. He'd given her a pen—one of the pens the peace accord had been signed with, which she hadn't appreciated very much, because it had seemed like the kind of thing any boss might do and she was sick to death of Josh acting like her boss and nothing else. But he'd never sent her flowers.

She didn't know why that had bothered her so much—they wouldn't have been any more personal than the pen, and in some ways less—but it had. He used to send her flowers for their non-anniversary, just to drive her crazy, but he'd been the only person she knew who hadn't sent some to her when she was in the hospital, and it had hurt her that he hadn't bothered. It had seemed like a deliberate avoidance of anything that might suggest romantic interest, as if he had suddenly realized that by coming to Germany he might have made their friends, or maybe even Donna herself, think she meant more to him than she did, and then he felt he had to backpedal frantically to correct the mis-impression.

She wondered now what kind of flowers he _had_ got her, and how he could have dropped them, and why he'd never got her any again. Then she thought how ridiculous it was to be worrying about all that now, when they were living together, and whatever he'd felt or hadn't felt then was in the past and could hardly matter any more now at all.

"You had so many," Josh said again, still talking about the flowers. "Your room at the rehab place was full of them. And I thought. . . ."

"You thought what, Josh?"

He shrugged again.

"It doesn't matter. When are you going to get together with Ayres, anyway?"

"On Thursday. I said I'd meet him for lunch at the Hawk and Dove."

"He'll look like a real idiot if he brings flowers to the Hawk and Dove."

"I told you, he won't _be_ bringing flowers, Josh. And if he does, I'll tell him to give them to the waitress, or something. Look, Josh, do you want to come, too?"

Josh looked startled.

"What?"

"Do you want to come? When I meet with Colin? So there won't be any question about how things stand?"

"You can't want me to," he said, flatly.

"Of course I do, if it would be more comfortable for you. I know you said you didn't like him, but I think you'd really find him quite interesting if you gave him a chance. And I'm sure he'd like you."

Josh flushed, and smiled a little.

"That's sweet of you, Donna, but you don't have to do that. I trust you, really I do—I never meant to suggest I didn't. I couldn't come, anyway; my schedule's jammed all week, I'm afraid. But thanks for asking. Go and have fun and eat one of the H & D's hamburgers for me."

"Burned to a crisp like yours?"

"Any way you want it, but with fries. Your own fries. No nibbling his fries, Donna—you have to have your own."

She smiled.

"No nibbling his fries?"

"You only get to eat my fries."

"Josh, there's nothing meaningful about eating someone's fries."

"Yes, there is."

"No, there isn't. I used to eat your fries all the time."

"I know. And you still do. But you should only do it with me."

"I've eaten other men's fries, Josh, and it didn't mean anything."

"You shouldn't have. I don't want to know about that."

Donna eyed him strangely. Really, he could be very odd sometimes.

"I'll be getting soup, Josh, or a salad."

"Order fries with it—you know you always want them. And if he brings flowers, shove them down his throat."

She shook her head, and smiled.

It was the last time she was able to talk about Colin Ayres to Josh and smile for a very long time.

oooooo

"How'd your lunch with Ayres go?"

"Oh—fine."

"Really? You didn't have to shove his flowers down his throat, or get the waiter to pull him off you and throw him out the door?"

"No."

"Are you okay, Donna?"

"Yes."

"You don't seem okay. Was it something Ayres said? Or something I did?"

"I'm fine."

"You're not."

"I am, really, Josh. I've just got a bit of a headache. I think I'll go out when we get back and take a walk."

"Do you want company?"

"Not right now, thanks."

"Okay."

"Okay. Here we are. I'll go now."

"Donna?"

"Yes?"

"That bastard said something to upset you, didn't he?"

"I'll tell you about it later, Josh."

"I'll kill him."

"He was fine, Josh. I'll tell you about it later."

"Okay. Please do. You'll take one of the agents, won't you?"

"Like they'd give me a choice."

oooooo

"Thank God."

"Why on earth?"

"You're home safe."

"I wasn't gone that long, Josh. And Greg was with me."

"I was worried about you. You seemed upset when you left."

"I guess I was a bit."

"Can you—tell me about it now?"

"I need you not to get uptight about this, Josh."

"I'm already uptight about it. I just need to know what it is I'm uptight about."

"Don't freak out on me."

"I'll try not to. What the frigging hell did that bastard do, Donna?"

"He's not a bastard, Josh. And he didn't _do_ anything."

"Well, what did he say, then? He said something that upset you, didn't he?"

"A little. At first. I'm not upset about it now, not really. In fact, I think I'm—interested. Maybe. I'll have to think about it some more."

"You're—_interested_?"

"_Not_ in Colin, Josh, for God's sake! In what he said."

"Which was?"

"Josh, I've been meaning to tell you. There's going to be an exhibition next month. Of Colin's photographs. It's at the U.N., but it's in conjunction with the State Department; it's to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of their involvement in peacekeeping."

"The anniversary's not till November."

"They're doing things about it all year. State got involved because they want something to showcase the success of the mission in . . ." Donna swallowed.

"In Gaza," Josh finished for her, slowly.

"That's right."

"So, why does Ayres want to involve you? You don't—oh my God, he didn't—he didn't—" Josh choked, and couldn't go on.

"Yes, he took pictures of me. Before the explosion, when we were going around together."

Josh nodded, painfully.

"He talked to me about those last summer, actually. He wanted my permission to use them in the show. I gave it to him; I didn't have a problem with that at all. He also asked me to write something about my experiences there, when he was taking me around, showing me the place, and—and I did."

Josh looked down at the floor.

"It was after the convention, I didn't have much to do at work, and it didn't take long—I had some notes to work from, those emails I sent you from there. It wasn't a big deal."

"He couldn't write the text himself?" Josh's voice was rough. He didn't look up.

"Yes, of course he could, but he said he'd remembered how interested I'd been, and how shocked by some of it, and he thought it would be more powerful if it came from me. From what he called 'an innocent eye.'"

"That's Ruskin," Josh growled. "Not Ayres."

"I know that, Josh. I imagine Colin does, too."

"So he's a plagiarist who can't even write his own text, and he hit you up for it because he knew you'd do a better job than he could—but what was he talking to you about today? Why were you upset? Has he messed around with what you wrote? Cut it till you can't recognize it anymore? Or said something you didn't like about it? What did the asshole say that upset you?"

Donna shook her head. She couldn't be bothered arguing with him about Colin not being a plagiarist or an asshole; she was still shaking inside. Her voice shook a little, too, when she answered.

"He—had some more pictures. For the show. Ones I—hadn't seen—that he hadn't shown me—before."

Josh's head shot up.

"More pictures? Of you?"

Donna nodded, painfully. He stared at her, comprehending and appalled.

"From—when—"

"When I was in the car. Yes."

"The god-damned, fucking, fucked-up—"

He broke off, choking. He obviously couldn't find a word foul enough for what he wanted to say.

"He's a photographer, Josh," Donna said, choking a little, too, as she tried to protest. "That's what he does. He said the Israeli police wouldn't let him near to help. He said he was almost crying when he was taking the pictures, but there wasn't anything else he could do."

"_Almost_ crying?" Josh's voice was unrecognizable. "The god-damned fucking bastard. He—didn't—show them to you, did he?" He was clenching his hands on the edge of the sofa where they were sitting; his knuckles were white.

"No. He offered to. I said I wasn't ready to see them yet. He seemed to understand."

"_Yet!? _Donna you can't—"

"Yes, I can."

"You _can't!"_

"Why not?"

"You just can't."

"_Why_ can't I?" Donna, who had been sitting very still with her hands clasped together in her lap, suddenly stood up. Her eyes were flashing. "You think they'd upset me too much, if I saw them? You think I'm too weak for that? I think I might want to see them, Josh. I think I might want to go to this show. He asked me to do that—to give him permission to use them, and to come to the opening of the show. And I might want to."

"I—I—" Josh sounded almost short of breath. "You just can't. You can't do that. I—" But he couldn't finish. Donna fixed him with an icy look, suddenly furious. She'd been upset about this all afternoon; she'd finally got herself calmed down about it, and now he had to act like this about it?

"How _dare_ you, Josh? You can't tell me what I can and can't do. You're not my boss anymore! This isn't about you; it's not your decision to make. It's mine. I haven't made it yet, but I'm going to think about it, and I'm telling you I might—I just might—decide I want to do it. And I don't want you to try to stop me, just because you can't stand Colin Ayres."

"I—" Josh said again, looking at her helplessly.

"It's for the U.N., Josh. It's about peacekeeping, about President Bartlet's accord, about the work we're still doing there. State's behind it, Colin said; Secretary Vinick's all in favor; there won't be any problem about my being the First Lady's C.o.S. and participating if I want to. I would think you'd want to support that. I would think you'd want to support _me,_ if I decide to do this. You said you would. You said you'd take me seriously, support me in doing what I need to do, and now look at you—you just want to say no, no, you can't do that, and order me around, as if it was your decision, as if all that mattered was your petty, ridiculous insecurities and jealousies, because you don't like the man who's asked me to do this, because I slept with him once!"

Josh stared at her, his face white and his mouth set with what looked like anger. Then, abruptly, he turned around and walked very fast towards the bathroom, shutting the door behind him hard.

Donna felt her legs give underneath her, and she sat down suddenly on the couch again. She was trembling all over. She'd thought the walk she'd taken had calmed her nerves, but clearly it hadn't been enough.

She waited for Josh to come out of the bathroom, but he didn't: to her disbelief, she heard water start pouring in the bathtub, and then the gush of it as the shower was turned on full. He'd decided to take a shower? Now? _Passive-aggressive idiot, _she thought; how dare he just walk away like that in the middle of an argument? She should have guessed he wouldn't be able to take an emotional scene—he could argue all day with congressmen and senators, but when things got personal, he'd shut down, she should have expected that. But how could he expect _her_ not to be emotional, after what had happened?

Didn't she have a right to be? It had upset her, Colin telling her about taking her picture after the explosion, thinking about it all again, and realizing that she was going to have to make herself look at his pictures if she wasn't going to be a total wimp and let everyone involved with this project down. She was going to have to let other people look at his pictures, pictures of her at the worst moment of her life, damaged, helpless, bleeding. . . . Oh, she didn't _have_ to, but she didn't want to have to say no, either. No wonder she was upset.

And instead of calming her down and helping her think it through, Josh had just tried to tell her what to do, as if he was her boss again, as if what she wanted and needed didn't matter at all. It was so like him. She was furious. If he came out now, she didn't think she _could_ talk to him, but he wasn't coming out. He was taking the longest shower she'd ever known anyone to take. He was trying to avoid her, that was obvious; he was acting like a teenage girl—like Donna herself, when she'd been fifteen and angry with her parents, and the bathroom had been the only place to hide.

All right, then, he could avoid her. She'd avoid him, too. She stood up, shakily, and made her way to the bedroom, closing the door with a decided bang behind her.

There was a tiny two-piece off the bedroom, where they kept toothbrushes and some of her sanitary supplies and not much else. She used it now, brushing her teeth carefully, paying attention to each one. Then she splashed cold water on her face—her cleansers were all in the other room, and Josh seemed to have used up all the hot water already—and patted herself dry on the hand-towel. She undressed, put on her oldest, ugliest flannel pajamas, and curled herself up on the extreme edge of their bed.

She needn't have bothered with the "don't touch me" routine. Josh never came to bed that night. When she woke up the next morning, he'd left for work already. There was a bunch of flowers from the corner store on the kitchen counter, with a note: "I'm sorry. Do what you want about it—it's up to you. I didn't mean to try to tell you what to do."

When she got to the office, the first thing she did was call Louisa. She went to see her a few days later, the earliest appointment they could both fit in.

oooooo


	13. Chapter 13

"You said your boyfriend isn't happy about the show?"

"No."

"Why do you think that is?"

"He doesn't like the man I'm working with, the photographer who asked me to do this."

"Why is that?"

"I slept with him—with Colin, the photographer—a couple of times, when I first met him. It wasn't a serious thing, just a fling, but I think that bothers him."

"He's jealous?"

"Probably. I've told him there's nothing to worry about, but he's just not happy about it."

"He doesn't trust you, then?"

"He says he does."

"But you don't believe him?"

Donna sighed.

"It's not just about Colin. I—I don't think he trusts me to be able to do this. I think he thinks I'm going to break down at the opening, make a fool of myself somehow."

"Did he say that?"

"Not exactly. He just kept saying, 'You can't,' when I was telling him about it. I told him he couldn't tell me what I can or can't do."

"That's good."

"He apologized afterwards, but . . . I can tell he doesn't like my going to this. He closes up whenever I mention it, changes the subject, shuts me out."

"And how does that make you feel?"

"Not good at all. . . ."

oooooo

"The exhibition," Donna said to Josh over breakfast one Saturday morning two weeks later, "is opening next week."

His face went very still.

"Yeah?" he said, putting his coffee cup down. Some of the steaming liquid sloshed over the edge onto his hand. He winced, and wiped at it without taking his eyes off her face.

"On April 2. That's a Friday night."

"Okay," Josh said cautiously.

"The First Lady would like to go, but she can't—Peter has a school concert that night."

"That's too bad. It would have been a good event for her to go to. I'd thought you'd have put it on her schedule for sure."

"Yes, I'd hoped she could make it, but she says she can't. She was very sorry about it, but of course the children come first."

"Of course."

"She's giving me time off to go up for it, though."

"Okay."

Donna took a deep breath.

"I thought I'd fly up that afternoon, and come back Saturday or Sunday."

Josh blinked, and looked down at his coffee.

"Okay," he said again. He picked it up to take another drink.

"I was hoping," Donna said, trying to make her voice sound bright and cheery, as if she wasn't afraid of how he was going to react to what she wanted to say, "that you'd come with me."

Josh looked up, his eyes wide. The coffee spilled again, steaming hot liquid pouring over his hand and onto his legs. He didn't seem to notice.

"Come—with you?" he asked. He sounded as if the air had been knocked out of him.

"Yes, Josh, come with me. We could make a weekend of it, maybe go to a show or something on Saturday evening—or Saturday afternoon, if you don't want to be away too long." She sipped her coffee carefully, trying to look cool and collected, as if this didn't matter much to her, but it did. She didn't want to have to go to the opening by herself, and she wanted Josh to see the work she'd done. She wanted him to tell her she'd done well. That didn't seem unreasonable; it was one of the things partners were supposed to do for each other, surely.

"I, um . . . I . . ." he swallowed, and looked down. "I—hadn't thought—I hadn't expected—I don't know if—"

"If what, Josh?" Donna said, hearing the chill in her voice and not caring. Surely he wasn't going to let her down on this? Surely?

"If I can," he said, quietly. He was staring down at his hands. There was a red mark on one of them where the coffee had spilled on him. He picked up a napkin and started to blot the coffee up, as if he had only just noticed it.

"I've asked Margaret what your schedule looks like that weekend, Josh, and there's nothing major on. Sam can manage on his own for a day, surely."

"I—" He swallowed again, put the napkin down, and looked up at her, something like desperation in his eyes.

"_Josh!_ What's the matter with you? I'm not asking for the moon here; I'm just asking you to take a few hours off to go with me to New York. We don't have to do a show if you don't want to take the time, but the opening—I can't believe you wouldn't have been planning to go! You know how important this is to me. I know you don't like it—I know you don't like Colin and you don't like that it's him I worked with on this, and I know you probably think I can't do this and I'm going to make a fool of myself somehow, but—"

"Donna!" Josh sounded horrified. "I don't think that. I've never thought that. Why would you ever think I would think that?"

"You said I couldn't do it."

"_When?_"

"That night, when I first told you about it. You kept saying, 'You can't do that. You can't do that.'"

Josh stared at her, appalled.

"I didn't mean that, Donna. I didn't mean it that way at all. I—I—" he floundered, trying to find the words to explain, but she went on,

"This is so important to me, Josh. I want to do it. I _need_ to do it. It doesn't have anything to do with Colin; I've told you over and over that I'm not interested in him that way, and he's not interested in me; you have nothing to worry about from him. And I know it's going to be hard, to walk in there and see those pictures blown up to twice life size and _not _make a fool of myself by breaking down. I've seen the prints now—" Josh sucked in his breath, a strange, small gasping noise—"but those were so much smaller, and nobody was watching me, it didn't matter how I reacted, and I know this will be different. That's why I need you there; I—I don't actually know if I can do it by myself. I—I hope I could, but—I don't want to, I—I want you there, with me, and—and I want you to see what I wrote, about the people I met in Gaza, and the peacekeepers, and—I just want you to be there, that's all."

Donna could feel the tears starting behind her eyes, and closed them so she couldn't see the pity or the rejection in his face. She felt exposed, pathetic, vulnerable. This was the closest she'd ever come to telling him how much his opinion mattered to her.

She heard his chair scrape back, and thought perhaps he was going to leave the room. But he knelt down beside her chair, and put his arms around her.

"Donna." His voice was very soft. "I had no idea you felt like that. Of course I want to see what you've done. And I'm sure you won't break down, but if you do, you won't have made a fool of yourself—you couldn't ever do that. Everyone would understand. But you won't—you'll be fine. You'd be fine by yourself—more than fine, you'd be wonderful. But if you want me to be there with you, then I'll be there. No matter what."

Donna face was wet by the time he'd finished, but she didn't care now. She thought she had never felt so much love for Josh as she felt right then.

"Thank you," she gulped. He squeezed her tightly and she relaxed into his arms, loving the warmth and strength of them. She hadn't realized how tense she'd been about this until now.

"No matter what," he said again, so softly that it was almost as if he was talking to himself, not to her. "No matter what."

"I—I'll understand if something comes up, Josh. If the President needs you, if you really can't—"

"It won't," he said, very seriously. "Nothing will come up. I won't let it."

She had to smile then, because nobody but Josh could say something as ridiculous as that and sound as though he actually thought he could make it happen.

oooooo


	14. Chapter 14

"So, he went in the end?" Louisa asked. "After you told him what you wanted?"

"Yes, he did."

"And how was it?"

"The opening was . . . very nice. Lovely, really. Everything was very nice. Just about everyone said nice things. . . ."

But her voice was flat and expressionless, Louisa noted, at odds with her words. Donna had sounded much more enthusiastic than that when she'd called Louisa after the show. The therapist wondered what had happened to change that now.

oooooo

It _had_ been lovely, for the most part. She bought a new dress for the occasion, long and silvery-blue and, she thought, quite sophisticated-looking—and new shoes and a new handbag to match. Josh wore his tuxedo. They flew up on Friday afternoon and checked into their hotel and changed, and he took her out to a quiet little restaurant before the opening. She was too nervous to eat much, but managed a bowl of soup and some bread, and told him it was delicious, which it was. He didn't eat much, either. He looked as pale and tense as she felt, but because she was so happy that he'd agreed to come she couldn't feel angry with him for being nervous on her account, and decided it was rather sweet of him, instead.

They took a taxi to the U.N. Donna held her breath when she walked into the gallery, but Colin was there to greet them, and he swept her off to be introduced to the various dignitaries who were gracing the opening with their presence, and she found that she was able to keep her eyes on the faces of the people who were talking to her and didn't really have to look at the pictures directly at all.

Everyone said sympathetic things about the bombing and her injuries, and complimented her on what she had written about her experiences in Gaza, and several society women told her gushingly that they'd been moved to tears by her words. Waiters moved around, offering champagne and delectable-looking hors d'oeuvres from silver trays, and while it wasn't the most glamorous affair Donna had ever been to—it didn't compare to a State Dinner at the White House, or an Inaugural Ball—it was still the most glamorous one she had ever been that close to being the center of attention at, and she found it a heady experience.

After a while she stole a look out of the corner of her eye at one of the pictures of herself, and was surprised and pleased to find that it didn't unnerve her the way she'd expected it to. After that she let herself look about freely, and was able to tell Colin quite sincerely that she thought the photos were well-chosen and effectively hung, and that the show was dramatic and powerful and showed something important about Gaza and the effects of the peacekeepers there. Josh grunted some sort of assent from beside her. He was clearly no more enamored of Colin Ayres than he had been before, but Donna was far too happy and excited to get distressed about that.

The only thing that disturbed her enjoyment at all was a little flutter of conversation she overheard about midway through the evening. A woman came up and touched Josh on the elbow. "Josh, _dear,_" she said, gushingly, just as Colin was introducing Donna to yet another socialite. Josh turned away towards the other woman, and Donna was forced to turn towards the socialite and act as though she were listening to what the woman had to say, but her attention was all on the conversation behind her.

"Dear Josh," the woman at Josh's elbow purred again, "it's been _such_ a long time. How _are_ you? How have you been?"

"Fine, Lizzie," Josh said, with, Donna was relieved to notice, no particular enthusiasm. "What about you?"

"Oh, I'm doing _wonderfully,_ just _wonderfully,_ darling. I'm writing for the _Times _ now, you know. Helping review art shows and things—I'm reviewing this one, of course. And I'm married! Can you believe it? Three years ago. Joe Reisman, darling, he's an investment banker, we're doing very well. We have a little girl now, Maggie, _such_ a darling baby, so sweet. But what about you, Josh? Not married yet? I don't see a ring. Josh, darling, you really _must _find a nice Jewish girl and settle down soon. Yes, I know I sound like our mothers, but you know, they're weren't as crazy as we used to think. It really does make such a difference, having that in common. Joe and I—well, I knew right away, really, when I met him, that it was going to work, and that was part of the reason why. We've started going to temple, too. I know, I know. It's because of Maggie, I suppose. You'll see—you'll want to, too, when you have children. You'll want them to know who they are. What? You're here with someone? Oh, I didn't realize!"—Lizzie giggled—"How tactless of me! But you know what I'm like. I don't think she heard me, do you? She's the woman in the pictures, isn't she? And she wrote some of the text they've put up there. Rather naive, don't you think? Oh dear, there I go again! Oh, look—there's Robbie Fraser, from the MoMA, you know, over there—I _must _ catch him! Bye for now, Josh darling! I'll try to catch you later; of course I'd love to meet your date. But don't forget what I said. Our mothers really weren't as crazy as we used to think."

And then she apparently dropped Josh's arm and darted across the room after Robbie Fraser from the MoMA, because the chatter stopped. But when the socialite said goodbye and Donna turned around, Josh was gone, too. She searched the room for him. The woman he'd been talking to—a tall redhead—was some distance away, in animated conversation with an elegantly-dressed older man with thinning hair and a silvered beard. She couldn't see Josh at all.

He reappeared after a while, though, carrying drinks for both of them, and rejoined her as a present, if rather silent, companion. She decided not to mention what she'd heard. In fact, she tried to put it out of her mind. Josh obviously hadn't been interested in the woman, whatever their former relationship had or hadn't been—Donna hadn't really been able to tell whether she was an old girlfriend or not. And just because she thought Josh should marry a nice Jewish girl didn't mean he thought so. Did it? And so she thought Donna's texts were naive. Well, she probably thought any kind of settlement with the Palestinians was unacceptable. Donna had just described the situation in Gaza as she'd seen it. And everyone else tonight had told her she'd done a wonderful job, and what she'd written had been very effective and moving. . . .

Donna did her best to put that little exchange out of her mind, and for a while she almost succeeded. The champagne probably helped, but it was a conscious decision, really, as conscious as the one she'd taken in coming here at all. She was proud of herself, and had a right to be; she'd written those texts hanging on the wall, and she'd made herself come and look at those pictures of herself, and she hadn't broken down. This was her evening, and she wasn't going to let anything spoil it for her, not even a negative comment from an art critic at the _New York Times, _who just happened to be an old friend of Josh's, and who thought a Jewish man could only be really happy if the woman he married was Jewish, too.

It helped that Josh hovered at her elbow for the rest of the evening, and brought her drinks, and didn't act as if he was regretting anything, even though he didn't have much to say, either. But when the evening was finally over and they were waiting for their taxi back to their hotel, he slipped an arm around her and squeezed tightly, and told her in a husky voice that she'd done a great job and he was proud of her. That was the shining cap on the night, as far as Donna was concerned; nothing could put a dent in that.

When they went to bed, he kissed his way down her body and did everything she could have asked for with his mouth. And then he rubbed her back, and when Donna asked, rather sleepily, if he didn't need something too, he said that was all right, they were both tired, and it could wait till the morning. She was tired enough to be grateful.

But in the morning Josh was up before she was, showered and dressed and busy with his BlackBerry. He looked pale and preoccupied, and didn't seem inclined to go back to bed with her again. Donna drank some coffee and read the papers while he worked.

Of course the first thing she looked for was the reviews of the show. She got a bit of a shock when she saw them. Everyone had liked Colin's pictures, and some of the critics praised the texts Donna had written and her courage in taking a stance for greater understanding and peaceful coexistence, when she could so easily have wanted vengeance against the terrorists who had injured her and killed her companions. But it was hard to remember what the good reviews had said after reading the one in the _Times. _Josh's friend seemed to have nothing good to say about it; "naive" was one of the kinder words she used. Donna felt as if she'd been kicked in the gut; she hadn't realized how much she had invested in the show until then.

She wondered whether Josh had read the reviews or not. He'd obviously been at the papers before she got up, but they weren't open to the arts pages, and she couldn't tell how far he'd read before getting called away by work. She wanted him to say something comforting, but he never mentioned the show at all, and she couldn't bring herself to be the one to bring it up. What if he _had_ read them, and thought Lizzie was right? What if he thought Lizzie was right about other things as well?

They ate lunch out and went to the matinee of the show Donna had chosen that afternoon, but she didn't enjoy it much, and didn't think he did, either. He seemed tired and distracted through most of it, fiddling with his BlackBerry, and he disappeared for most of the last half, she supposed to deal with something that had come up at work.

They flew back that evening. When they got home, he said he was terribly sorry but he had a lot to catch up on; if she didn't mind, he'd work on it for a while and come to bed later. Donna understood. What she didn't understand was why he never did come to bed, even though she heard him taking a shower for what seemed like hours in the middle of the night.

oooooo


	15. Chapter 15

"But?" Louisa prompted.

"What?" Donna asked. She'd been lost in her own thoughts for a minute or two. Louisa was trying to wait patiently; she wanted Donna to tell the story her own way.

"You said the opening night of the exhibit was lovely."

"Oh yes, it was."

Donna's voice was still flat, but Louisa decided to let that go for now.

"So, what happened after that?"

Donna bit her lip, and looked down at the floor.

"I don't know," she whispered.

"Something changed?"

Donna nodded, painfully.

"With Josh?"

She nodded again.

"Can you tell me about it?"

Donna took a deep breath.

"I—he—he started to be very busy after that. I wasn't surprised at first; he's got a terrible job, and taking the time to go away with me like that, I knew he'd have to put in extra time to catch up. But. . . ."

"But?"

"It—never stopped. After that weekend, he just seemed to be busy all the time. He's always busy, of course, but even busier than that. And whenever we were together, things were—different. I don't know how to describe it. Just—different."

"Not different in a good way, I take it?"

"No. It was like—like he wasn't really quite there. When we were talking—it was as if he didn't really want to be. Even when—" She blushed, and broke off.

"When you were in bed?"

Donna nodded, her eyes cast down. Sex wasn't something she'd talked to her therapist about before. There hadn't been any reason to: she hadn't been seeing anyone when she first started talking to Louisa, and there hadn't been any need to since she started sleeping with Josh. Until now.

"How was it different?"

Donna fiddled with another kleenex in her lap.

"Just—different," she said again. "I don't really know how to describe it. He seemed less—passionate, I guess. As if—he didn't really want to, almost, or as if—I don't know. There was something wrong, I could tell."

"Did you talk to him about it?"

Donna bit her lip.

"I tried to," she whispered.

"What did he say?"

"He was upset. He said he was sorry, he was tired, he'd been feeling a little off-color. . ."

Louisa tipped her head sideways, and considered this.

"You didn't believe him?"

"Yes. Yes, of course I believed him—I could see that something was the matter. I just didn't think . . . ." Her voice trailed off again.

"That that was the whole story?"

Donna nodded again, swallowing hard.

"What do you think he wasn't telling you?"

"I don't know."

"You've got some idea, surely?"

Donna bit her lip, and looked out the window.

"I thought—I wondered—if—maybe—" She stopped, and swallowed. It was a minute before she began again. "There was this woman at the Gaza show, an old friend of Josh's, maybe an old girlfriend, I couldn't tell. I overheard them talking. They were right behind me. She kept saying that Josh should find a nice Jewish girl to marry. She'd gotten married herself since he'd seen her last, and she said it made all the difference, having that in common. She talked about going to temple, and how important it was, when you had children, to be able to share that, so they would know who they are."

"So you think maybe he was thinking about that?"

Donna nodded again, mutely. The lump in her throat wouldn't let any words out.

"Did you ask him?"

She shook her head.

"Why not?"

"I—" She choked a little, and squeezed her hands together more tightly.

"You were afraid of hearing the answer?"

She nodded again, and looked away. A few moments passed. Then she said, softly,

"That wasn't all. She—that woman—was an art critic for the _New York Times_. She laughed at what I'd written—you know, about Gaza and the Palestinians and Israel. She said it was naive. I—Josh didn't say anything, and he told me afterwards I'd done well and he was proud of me. But—I can't help wondering—if, really. . . ."

"He agreed with her?"

Donna nodded again, not meeting Louisa's eyes.

"He—was never really very keen on the peace plan," she explained. "He's softened a bit on it, since it's been working, but at first . . . I don't think he thought it was going to work. He was so angry with the Palestinians for supporting terrorists. And, well, he's Jewish."

"So you thought he thought you were naive to support it?"

"Not so much to support it, but—some of the things I said—about people just having to get to know each other—I suppose. . . . That was what that woman talked about, anyway, in her review the next day. She really tore my part of the show apart."

"And you think that made him look at you differently?"

Donna nodded again, the lump back in her throat and her eyes hot and burning.

"It might have. I—I guess I've always thought—he might think—I wasn't—I'm not—"

"Not what, Donna?"

"I don't have a college degree, you know," Donna burst out. "I never finished it. I was his assistant for eight years—his secretary, really. He's twelve years older than me. He's got degrees from Harvard and Yale; he was a Fulbright Scholar; everyone says he's one of the most brilliant political minds of his generation. I'm smart, and I have a good job now, but I'm not in his league, I know that. And . . . And . . ."

"You think you aren't smart enough for him?"

Donna bit her lip but nodded briefly, and looked out the window again. There were bright red spots on her cheeks, but the rest of her face was deathly white.

"Has he said that?"

"No," she whispered. "No. But . . . ."

"You think he's started to think it?"

She was still looking out the window, twisting her hands in her lap.

"Maybe," she said quietly. "I don't know."

"Perhaps you should ask him."

She went paler than ever, and the red spots on her cheeks burned more brightly.

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"I—it would be too humiliating. And anyway, he isn't there to ask."

Ah, thought Louisa. Now we're getting to the heart of this.

"He's not there?"

"No. Something's come up at work, and he hasn't been home in days. Four—almost five days. Since last Friday."

"That's a long time."

"It can happen. I—there really is something, this time. Everyone there got called in and is working round the clock. Not like—"

"Not like what, Donna?"

She hesitated.

"Go on, Donna," Louisa urged.

"Not like before," Donna said, finally. "After the Gaza show, when he started to seem so busy all the time. I thought at first it was just work, but it went on and on for weeks. And then I ran into Sam."

"Sam?"

"Sam Seaborn, Josh's deputy. And he was talking about his fiancée, and what fun they were having going out for drives together on the weekends, exploring the area. They'd been to the mountains, and Baltimore, and the Eastern Shore. I asked how they could find the time, and he said they couldn't always, of course, but the last few weeks had been so much calmer at work that he'd been able to get away from the office on weekends, and they'd really been enjoying it. He said I should be sure to make Josh get away for a bit, while we had the chance."

"Would Sam's schedule be the same as Josh's?"

"Not exactly, of course, but if Josh was really busy, Sam would be, too. There's no reason Josh should be going crazy by himself, not at this point. Before we took office, when he was trying to study up on everything—I could have seen it then. But he's done all that now, and he's been learning how to delegate more, finding his stride."

"Could it be something that he can't involve Sam in?"

Donna bit her lip. She thought about the MS crisis, and how long Josh had waited to tell her. But. . . .

"I thought about that," she said. "Things like that do come up in a job like his, of course. But I don't think it could be. The President and Mrs. Santos went to Camp David last Thursday, just before this big thing started. They've come back now, of course, but then—on Thursday—the President came in while I was helping Mrs. Santos get ready; he was laughing, and she was laughing, and they both seemed really relaxed and happy. He said something like Sam said, about taking Josh and going away for a nice weekend together."

"Did you tell Josh that?"

"Yes. He said he was sorry, but he just couldn't go away again right now. I asked him to explain, and he said he couldn't. He got upset. Quite upset. . . ."

oooooo

"Donna, I can't! I just can't! Look, I'm sorry—I went to New York, didn't I? I went to New York. I thought that would make you happy."

"I'm just asking _why, _Josh? Why are you so busy? Why don't I ever see you anymore?"

"You see me. We see each other. I come home, like I promised I would. I come home."

"You come home and you bury yourself in your work. We haven't talked in weeks."

"We talk! I talk to you! Of course I do!"

"Not for more than a minute or two at a time, Josh. And I'm just asking _why?_"

"It's a crazy job, Donna. I thought you knew that. I thought you knew it was going to be like this sometimes."

"But everyone else seems to be taking time off right now. The President is off at Camp David with his wife and kids; he looked pretty relaxed this afternoon. He said I should get you to go away for a weekend. Sam was telling me about all the places he and Lorraine have been going."

"We went to New York."

"And stayed less than twenty-four hours. You didn't even see half the show."

"Is that what you're mad about?"

"I'm not _mad,_ Josh. I just don't understand."

"I—I've really got a lot on my plate right now, Donna. I'm sorry. I—I'll try to explain when things have calmed down a bit, when I've got things under control."

"But Sam said things _were _under control. And the President. . . ."

"That's Sam, Donna. And the President. They're not me, and I'm not them, and we have different jobs, and if things are going to stay under control for them, I've got to be able to deal with mine."

"You can't tell me about it?"

Josh had run his fingers through his hair and glanced at her for a moment with something like desperation in his eyes, then looked away. It struck her that he hadn't really looked at her the whole time they'd been talking, and that she couldn't remember when the last time he'd really looked at her had been.

"I'm sorry, Donna. I can't. I just can't."

And she'd felt her heart rip just a little, because she was quite sure that, whatever was keeping him from talking to her, it wasn't the Classified Information Act or national security. With the President and Sam both so relaxed, it had to be something else, something that—whatever Josh might be saying—didn't have to do with work at all. And she remembered Lizzie from the _New York Times_ again, and wondered whether Josh, too, thought she had been terribly naive in her statements about Palestinians and Israelis, or whether he had, for the first time in his life, begun to realize that, if he ever did get married and have children, he wanted to do it with a nice Jewish girl.

oooooo

Her attempt to talk to Josh on Thursday had had some effect: he left his papers earlier than usual that night, and came to bed with her. He kissed her and stroked her and brought her to climax, and then he kissed her and stroked her and did it all over again. But he didn't come himself. He didn't even try to. When she reached for him, she realized that he wasn't even hard.

"Josh?" she said, bewildered. He groaned.

"I'm sorry," he whispered into her neck. "It isn't you; it's me. I'm just too tired."

She tried to stroke him into arousal, but nothing happened. She didn't want to make a thing about it, didn't want to embarrass him: it was obvious that he was embarrassed enough already. She rubbed his back for a while, until they both drifted off to sleep.

She woke in the night to find the bed empty. She could hear the shower running in the bathroom across the hall. It was still running when she drifted uneasily back to sleep. She really didn't want to try to ask Josh again what was going on.

At four o'clock that morning Josh's pager and cellphone went off at the same time. He came into the bedroom to grab his clothes, and told her he had to go in. Something had happened in Kazakhstan. The President was flying back from Camp David. He didn't know when he'd be able to get home.

oooooo


	16. Chapter 16

"Sexual dysfunction can have a number of causes, you know," Louisa pointed out. "Stress is one. It can also be a sign of certain medical problems."

Donna looked alarmed.

"I hadn't thought of that," she said.

"Or it can be brought about by a change in medication."

"He isn't taking any medication," she said, doubtfully. "He used to, of course, after he was shot, but he hasn't needed anything for several years now."

"My point is that there could be any number of reasons why he had that reaction that night. It doesn't have to be due to decreased interest in you."

Donna flushed and looked down at her hands.

"On the other hand," Louisa continued, her voice very gentle. "since you have reason to believe he hasn't been honest with you about needing to work so continually, we might have to consider the possibility that his feelings have, in some way, changed. It's not uncommon for men to use work as an excuse, when they don't want to have difficult conversations with their wives or girlfriends. You say he does come home in the evenings?"

"Yes," Donna said, her voice trembling now. "Yes, until last weekend he came home every evening."

"Tell me about last weekend, then."

"But I've told you—that really is because of work," Donna said, quickly. "I'm sure of that. Something's happening—I don't know what, exactly, and I couldn't tell you if I did. I probably shouldn't even tell you that much. You won't—say anything to anyone, will you?"

"Of course not. Everything we discuss is confidential."

"Thank you. I'm sorry. It's just—working there, things get complicated sometimes."

Louisa thought for a minute. Then she looked at Donna shrewdly and said,

"So, if Josh has been away from home for five days but you're not worried about his reasons for staying away, why did you call me today? Something must have happened-you seemed very upset when you phoned. And when you arrived."

Donna twisted her hands together in her lap so hard Louisa thought she might actually break her fingers. A minute passed, and then another.

"Donna?" Louisa prompted her again. "What happened that upset you today?"

Donna shook her head a little.

"Not today," she whispered, at last. "Two—no, three days ago."

"Saturday?"

"Yes." Her voice was barely audible.

"What happened on Saturday, then?"

Donna stopped twisting her hands, and clasped them together to still them.

"I saw—" she breathed. "I saw—"

She swallowed, and couldn't go on.

"What did you see, Donna?" Louisa asked, patiently.

"I—there was—"

She swallowed, and stopped again.

"There was what, Donna?"

Donna still couldn't answer.

"What did you see, Donna?"

Another pause, then,

"He—a—photographer—"

Her voice was so quiet that Louisa had to lean forward to hear her properly.

"A photographer?"

Donna nodded, but her eyes never left her clasped hands, which she was pressing down so hard against her knees that Louisa thought she must be hurting herself.

"There—there were—pictures—"

She couldn't seem to finish.

"From Gaza?" Louisa asked, though it was hardly a question in her mind. She had thought all along that Donna's distress must have something to do with her having attended that exhibition and seen those pictures. It had been a good thing to do, she was sure of it, but even good things had less-good consequences sometimes that had to be dealt with.

But Donna was shaking her head, almost violently.

"No," she cried out, her voice suddenly not a whisper but a wail. "No. Not those. Oh, why did I ever care about those?"

Louisa picked up a pen and made a note of that.

"What pictures, then?" she asked, in an encouraging tone.

"Pictures—pictures of—oh God," Donna choked. "I can't stop seeing them. I can't. I can't. I can't."

"Pictures of what, Donna?" Louisa asked, evenly.

"Of—" Donna started, but her throat closed up and she couldn't finish. And then she started to cry.

oooooo


	17. Chapter 17

The photographer was young. That was the first thing she thought when she saw him sitting in the little coffee shop just around the corner from the White House where she'd said she could meet him on Saturday afternoon. Her agent was with her, but got a coffee and sat discreetly at the next table; the Chief of Staff's live-in girlfriend didn't get the full clear-out-the-room treatment that the President did, a fact that Donna was perpetually grateful for. She didn't think the young man even registered that she had someone with her.

He was probably in his mid-twenties, she realized later, but he looked younger: a thin, weedy guy with wispy blond hair and a scrappy little attempt at a beard. The black-rimmed glasses were another attempt to seem cool, but only made him look more feckless. She wondered how on earth he'd managed to get Colin's attention, let alone his interest in helping the boy get his pictures published, or put in a show, or whatever it was he wanted to do with them. He might be a very good photographer, of course, but he hardly seemed old enough to have had time to have gone anywhere or seen anything very interesting.

But appearances were obviously deceiving, because Colin had, in fact, sent this unimpressive young man to Donna and told him to show his pictures to her and get her permission to use them, or that was the impression Donna had gotten from the young man's rather garbled introduction on the phone on Friday, when he'd called to ask to meet her. He must have been at Gaza, too, and got some shots of her, and thought he could do something with them. She wondered how he had managed to get anything different enough that there would be any point in showing it after Colin's had made such a splash. She hoped Colin wouldn't be willing to waste her time just to get some kid off his back.

"Thor?" she asked, holding out her hand and trying not to laugh at the improbable name he'd given her over the phone. He was wearing it on a sticker on his shirt, as he'd promised. "Thor Andersen?" Really, it was ridiculous. If Colin hadn't sent him to her. . . . But he had, and she hadn't had anything better to do, with Helen Santos still at Camp David, and Josh holed up in the Sit. Room with the President, so here she was. . . .

The young man looked up eagerly.

"Donna? Ms. Moss?" he said, half-rising and shaking her hand. "Thank you for coming. Can I get you—" He looked flustered when he realized that Donna was already holding coffee. "I'm sorry; I meant to buy that for you," he said, smiling ingenuously. Donna found herself smiling back.

"That's all right," she said. "Don't worry about it."

"It's terribly nice of you to take the time. I know you must be very busy. But Colin Ayres said you were very interested in his project—I told you, I met him in New York, after seeing the show there—oh, and you wrote wonderfully for it, you really did—"

That was balm to Donna's soul. She felt herself relaxing, and smiled at the young man more brightly.

"And he said you were the one to talk to about using these. He seemed to think you could help me get permission to use them. . . ."

His voice trailed off a little, uncertainly. Donna thought that was an odd way of putting it—not "give me permission," but "help me _get_" it. Whatever had he taken shots of, that he thought she could help him get permission to use?

He was opening a thick envelope. Out of the corner of her eye Donna could see her agent watching closely, his hand hovering near his hidden weapon. She smiled indulgently, and leaned in closer. Nothing could be less threatening than this harmless, feckless young man.

Thor put a picture on the table in front of her. The print was large—eight by ten—and in color. It was a night scene, outdoors—there was a paved sidewalk, and lamp posts, and bushes in the background. There seemed to be a lot of people in the shot, students by the look of them—she could see backpacks and books poking out of shoulder bags. There was a sense of confusion in the picture—everyone seemed to be hurrying; some of them looked upset. Some of the faces were blurred, others in focus in the harsh glare of overhead lighting and the camera's flash, but there was nobody in the picture that Donna recognized.

"I'm sorry," she said, bemusedly. "I don't—"

"These just set the scene," Thor said, putting down another. She studied it politely. It was very similar to the first. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the photos—she could see no reason why this young man would want to show them to anyone, or why Colin would have recommended that she see them—and yet something about them was nudging at her consciousness uneasily, telling her she ought to recognize where they had been taken. The scene didn't really look familiar, though; she couldn't place it . . . .

"I was a freshman," Thor explained. "Photo-journalism major; I knew what I wanted to do, even then. I took my camera everywhere, hoping to get a good shot. Of course I had it with me that night, at the talk. They searched my bag going in, but they let me keep it—I worked for the student paper, I had a badge. I got a few good shots inside—I was up at the front. I was hoping to get him again when he came out, but they made us all wait while they took him out first, of course. When I got out everyone was screaming and running, and I didn't have any idea what had happened, what was going on, but I pulled out my camera again and just started shooting." He blinked, nervously. "Pictures, I mean, of course."

Donna had no idea what he was talking about.

"Who were you photographing inside?" she asked, wondering why on earth this should be any concern of hers.

"The President, of course," Thor said, putting another picture down. "President Bartlet. He'd been giving a talk—I thought you'd remember—"

Donna's heart stopped. She was quite sure, afterwards, that it literally stopped. She certainly stopped breathing. She couldn't speak. She couldn't hear. She couldn't think. All she could do was stare at the picture Thor had just set down on the table in front of her. She didn't want to see it, but she couldn't look away. She wished her eyes would stop working, the way everything else had, but they didn't. They would soon, though, she thought, vaguely. Her heart had stopped, she couldn't breathe anymore, she was going to die and this was the last thing she was going to see.

But her body wasn't that merciful. Somehow her heart did beat again, and somehow she must have taken another breath, even though she had no conscious awareness of doing it. Thor put another picture down beside the first, and then another. He was talking all the while; she could hear him now, his voice somehow just audible over the pounding of the blood in her ears. She couldn't shut his voice out, any more than she could shut her eyes or look away.

"I had a good telephoto—my parents gave it to me for my birthday that summer; I couldn't have got these without it. I saw him sitting there, and started to shoot. I was quite a ways back, but with that lens I was able to get a pretty good shot, wasn't I? And this one—I got in even closer. You can see his face pretty well there, can't you? And this one's really good, don't you think, with the blood all over his hands like that, and that expression in his eyes? Like he thought he was dying, by himself like that, alone. And this one—he's fainting, I guess, and that other man—it's Toby Ziegler, isn't it?—who's just come up is catching him; that's quite a shot, I think—like a pieta, almost, only two men, of course, not a man and a woman. . . . There's another like that here, with C.J. Cregg kneeling down beside him, and that's Sam Seaborn. And then the medics coming, and you can't see him as much anymore, just in this one—Cregg's holding his hand, that must be his blood all over her because she wasn't hurt, was she?

"I tried to publish these in the student paper—I was really excited about them—but the prof who was the advisor wouldn't let me—he said it would be bad taste, that I didn't want to get a reputation as an ambulance-chaser, or something like that. I shouldn't have listened to him, I realize that now, but I was wet behind the ears then, and he was a senior professor, so I thought he knew everything and I should do what he said. So I put the pictures away and didn't do anything with them—I just sent the ones of Bartlet's talk in, and some of those first ones you saw, the students running after they'd heard the shots, but I kept these back. Pretty dumb, really—I should have realized Havergill was an old-fashioned old fart even then, but it was years before I got that, and then I figured these were out of date and nobody would be interested. I did try, once—I wrote to the White House about it—but I just got a form letter back saying they wouldn't give permission.

"But after I saw Ayres' show in New York, and you there, and _him,_ I couldn't help thinking—well, this sort of thing is never really out of date, is it? There are a lot of hot issues here—guns, hate crimes, campus shootings—it's a kind of terrorism too, isn't it? So I got up my nerve to go to Ayres and tell him what I had, and ask him if he didn't think there might be something I could do with these still. And he said I should get the permission of the people in the pictures. I told him how I'd tried, and he seemed to think I'd have an easier time if I started with you. You're not in these, of course, but I gathered . . . I mean, I've read . . . that you and Lyman . . . I mean, you know him, don't you? And he was there with you, wasn't he, at Ayres' show, in New York, at the U.N.? I saw you both there; the father of a friend of mine had tickets for the opening and couldn't use them, so he gave them to my friend, and she asked me, because she knew it was the sort of thing I'm into.

"You were so great, Ms. Moss—he looked pretty bothered, but you were so cool, so totally together, even though all those pictures were of you. And what you said, what you wrote—I thought that was great, about having to be willing to put your own feelings aside to let other people see what had happened, so they could understand. Ayres said you'd been really good about it, that you weren't one of those people who asks how we can just stand there and take pictures and not try to help; you understand what photojournalism's all about, that we're there to record the news, not to get involved in it. So he thought I should show these to you and get you to talk to Lyman for me, ask him if he'd agree.

"I mean, you understand, don't you? You see how important these are, why they should be shown? The world should see what it looks like, what it feels like, to be shot at like that. And these pictures do that—you can really see what it felt like, can't you? It's all over his face, isn't it? And Ziegler's, and Seaborn's, and Cregg's. You'll talk to him, and to them, and make it all right for me to show these shots? I don't _have _to have permission, I know that, but it would be better if I did; he's a pretty important man; I wouldn't want to piss him off. And you were so cool about those other pictures, the ones of you, at Gaza—and they were _you._ You are okay with it, aren't you, Donna? I mean, Ms. Moss. You're—okay? You look kind of pale. Geez, I hope I haven't upset you with these. I never thought . . . I never thought . . . Ms. Moss? Are you feeling okay? You're okay about all this, aren't you, Ms. Moss? Ms. Moss? Are you okay?"

Donna finally made her mouth move. She didn't recognize the voice that came out.

"No," she whispered hoarsely. "No. No. No."

Her throat filled with hot bile and her eyes began to swim. Somehow her hand moved automatically to pick up her purse from the floor as she pushed her chair back and stood up. Her agent stood up, too, and took her arm as she stumbled blindly through the crowds of people lining up at the bar for their coffees, and out the door.


	18. Chapter 18

Greg drove her home through the afternoon thunderstorm, which was just beginning to break as they left the coffeeshop. Donna flinched at every flash of lightening and gunshot of thunder. When they got back to the house in Georgetown she ran inside, slamming the door in the agent's face. She made it to the bathroom just in time.

Afterwards, still shaky and sick, she sat on the couch, pulled her knees up to her face, and tried to breathe. She had no idea how long she sat there like that—minutes, hours, days?—but eventually she uncurled herself and got up. There was something she'd forgotten, something important that she'd done and had to undo.

Greg had gone off-shift, but another agent, David, followed her to her car and offered to drive. She was grateful for that; she didn't know if she could have driven. She sat in the back seat and stared blindly out the window. It was raining; the streets were slick and black and reflecting a tangle of lights from the cars, puddles of red, streams of it, everywhere—deep red, bright red, pools of brilliant red pulsing out of the cars and onto the pavement like blood streaming and pooling and staining everything, everywhere. . . .

She wanted to scream, but she knew if she started to, the agent would stop the car and then they wouldn't get there and she wouldn't be able to undo what she'd done.

Back at the coffee shop, the photographer was long gone. She got down on her hands and knees, looking under the bench, the tables, the chairs, while her confused but ever-cooperative agent stood guard. She swept the floor desperately with her hands, as if somehow that might turn up what she was looking for, but it was gone. He was gone.

"Are you all right?" a barista asked her. "Did you lose something?"

"An earring? A contact?" A white-haired woman at one of the tables asked, leaning down herself to see if she could help.

Donna stood up slowly, shaking her head, blinking back tears.

"What's the matter, dear?" the woman asked, kindly. "You look upset." Something inside Donna seemed to break at the motherly tones.

"I left him," she answered wildly, choking back a sob. "I left him. I left him."

"What's 'them,' dear? What have you lost?" the woman said, adjusting her hearing aid.

Donna just stared at her helplessly. Then she turned and made her way out of the restaurant again, David following protectively in her wake. Tears were starting to run down her face, and people were staring, but she didn't notice, didn't care. She'd left him. She'd left him lying there bleeding on the table. She'd left him, she'd left him, she'd left him. . . .

oooooo

"I left him. . . I left him. . . I left him. . . ."

The tears kept coming as Donna somehow managed to choke the story out to Louisa.

"You left some pictures, Donna. On a table in a restaurant. You couldn't have taken them with you—they weren't yours. There's nothing else you could have done."

Donna shook her head. Her hands were pressed together again, white-knuckled and trembling, and her tear-streaked face was miserable.

"I left _him._"

"You've had a bad shock," Louisa said, patiently. "You weren't expecting to see those images just then. If you'd had more preparation, you would have been all right. You did so well at the Gaza exhibit because you prepared for it; you'll be just fine about this, when you've had time to calm down and think about it rationally."

Donna shook her head.

"I shouldn't have left him," she said, miserably. "I shouldn't have left him. What was I thinking of, leaving him like that?"

"He's all right, you know," Louisa went on, reassuringly. "It was years ago."

"Two years," Donna whispered. "Just two years."

"It was more than that, Donna. You're not thinking clearly. The shooting at Rosslyn happened, what? Six, seven years ago."

Donna stared at her for a second, then shook her head a little, as if to clear it.

"Seven years," she agreed. "Rosslyn was seven years ago. I left him that night, too. I shouldn't have left him alone that night. And then. . . ." Her voice trailed away.

Louisa leaned forward a little.

"He wasn't alone, Donna. He was with the President and a lot of other people, wasn't he?"

Donna didn't say anything to that. Louisa pressed on:

"Seven years is a long time, Donna. He's still alive. They got him to the hospital in time, and he survived it. He's fine now."

Donna looked down at the kleenex she had shredded all over her lap.

"He's not fine," she said, in a colorless voice. "He's not fine."

"What do you mean?"

"I told you. He's been acting differently. Stressed. Really stressed. Not like himself at all—"

"He has a stressful job, Donna. But so do you."

Donna stared at her, bewildered. And then her cell phone rang.

She groped in her purse.

"Leave it, Donna."

Donna blinked at the woman sitting behind the desk.

"I can't. It might be him. I—"

"It can wait, Donna."

"It's Margaret," Donna said, looking at the display. "His assistant. I'm sorry, I have to take this call—"

"Not now, Donna. Whatever it is, it will keep; let it wait till we're finished. This is more important. This is critical, Donna: you haven't been thinking clearly, you know that. Your sense of time is distorted: you went back for those pictures, hours after you should have known the photographer would have left; you said just now that the Rosslyn shooting happened two years ago. You're not acting rationally." Louisa had had no idea, when Donna had come in, how close to a crisis the woman actually was. "Josh's assistant can wait. You need to stay with me until you get this sorted out."

Donna looked at the phone, then up at her therapist. The phone stopped ringing.

"That's right," Louisa said, relaxing a little in her chair. "Why don't you turn that off, and then you can focus on what matters right now. It's _you_ we have to be concerned about right now."

"Me?" Donna said, a tremble in her voice.

"That's right, Donna: you. Your issues, your needs are what matter right now. Everything else can wait."

Donna stared at her. A full minute passed, while Louisa held her eyes, more or less willing her patient to turn off her cell phone and put it back in her purse.

"That's what you've been saying all along, isn't it?" Donna said at last. "_My_ issues, _my_ needs." Her voice was wondering.

"Of course. You're my patient. You came to me for help. That's what this is all about: taking care of your needs." There was just a hint of impatience in Louisa's voice now.

"Just mine."

"We can't do anyone else's here, Donna."

"Just mine," Donna said again, still in that wondering tone. "Just me. That's all I've been thinking about, isn't it? All this time, ever since Gaza—just me."

"It's important to be able to think about yourself, Donna."

"Yes," Donna said. "Yes, of course it is. But—when does it start being about him, too?"

"About who?"

"Josh," Donna said. "When does it start being about Josh, too?"

"I don't do couples therapy, Donna. If you want that, I can give you some names—"

"Thank you," Donna said, slowly. "Thank you, but I—don't think that will be necessary. At least, not until I've taken care of some things myself, first."

And she stood up, and started to walk very quickly towards the door.

"Donna!" Louisa called out, sharply. "Donna, don't leave yet. You're not ready to go. You're at a crisis point; we've got to get this sorted out before you leave. There's a lot more we need to be working on here today. For you. "

Donna pulled herself up very straight, and stood in the doorway, looking at the therapist as if she were seeing her for the first time.

"No," she said, quite firmly, although her hands were still shaking a little. "No thank you, Louisa. What I need to do right now is call Josh."

Then she turned and walked out the door, closing it firmly behind her.

oooooo

Louisa stared after Donna, shaking her head. They had a lot more work to do there than she'd thought. Donna would be back, of course—and not just for the coat and umbrella she'd left on Louisa's stand. She'd never be happy until she'd learned to look after herself.

Her own phone rang. Louisa answered it, her voice a little sharper than usual—she was still irked by her patient's sudden departure. She didn't soften her tone when she heard her daughter's voice on the other end of the line.

"Megan? You know you shouldn't call me when I'm at the office. You missed the bus? Well, you're going to have to get home on your own. No, I can't come and get you, you know that. No, I'm not with a client right now, but I might have been—she only just left—and I have other things I need to take care of here before I come home. You're a big girl now; you can get home on your own. Yes, I know it's raining. . . ."

When she put the phone down, Louisa stared out of the window for a minute at the rain. She might as well leave now, she figured; she didn't have another appointment that day. She'd done the right thing in putting Megan off, though. The child was so clingy—she had to learn to look after herself. And Louisa liked to take a little time every day to unwind downtown before she had to drive home to Bethesda and make dinner and deal with the endless squabbles over homework and t.v. She needed that time. She would go and get a coffee and shop a little; she wanted a new lipstick, and perhaps some new shoes. Between her patients and her children, it was hard to find time to look after herself, but she had learned to make a point of doing it. You had to look after yourself, no matter what. Nobody else was going to do it for you.

oooooo


	19. Chapter 19

"I think you left your coat, Ms. Moss." That was Greg, one of her agents. They were in the elevator outside Louisa's office, about to go down to the lobby. "And your umbrella. Do you want to go back for them? It's pretty wet out there."

Donna waved him impatiently aside. She already had her cell phone pressed to her ear.

"Margaret?" she asked urgently, when the line was picked up. "It's Donna. Did you just call?"

"Donna."

Margaret's dire tone set Donna's heart pounding.

"What is it, Margaret?" she asked, shakily.

"Donna, I'm so sorry."

For the second time in three days, Donna's heart froze and she stopped breathing.

"You know I wouldn't bother you like this if it wasn't important."

Margaret sounded flustered, but was obviously not about to say what Donna had thought for a moment she was going to. Her heart started to beat again. She took a long, deep breath to steady herself.

"What is it, Margaret? What's wrong?"

"Josh would kill me if he knew I was calling you like this, and normally I wouldn't, of course, I'd go and get them myself. I have his keys, you know. But I just can't today, Donna, it's crazy here, you have no idea. They're in the Sit Room; I can't leave, not even for five minutes."

"What's going on, Margaret?" Donna asked, as patiently as possible. Margaret knew her job inside out and backwards, and Josh and Donna had both been deeply grateful that she'd decided to stay on and work for him as she had for C.J. and Leo, but there was no denying that she was a little odd—she always had been. Donna was used to it, but sometimes, when you wanted information urgently, it could be hard to take.

"Teddy's been sick, you know—he had a fever of 101 the first night, and then he just went crazy with itching, and his daycare couldn't take him until five days after the spots came out."

"Spots? What's the matter?"

"Oh, nothing serious—just chicken-pox, the poor darling—but they wouldn't take him at the daycare, and my sister was out of town, so I had to stay home with him, and Darlene's been taking my place. I just got back today."

"Oh. I didn't realize. Josh didn't say anything." There were two assistants in the pool who'd been trained to act as back-ups for Margaret, but she'd never needed to call one in before.

"No, of course, he wouldn't; he's been working round the clock on this,"—her tones grew hushed—"this _thing_; he hasn't had a minute to think of anything else. But Darlene didn't _tell_ me he needed anything, and I didn't think to check this morning—there was just so much else to do. And of course he hasn't been home in days. And now he tells me they upped the dosage again over a month ago, and he's been taking it from the supply here for weeks, and of course we've run out. Ran out days ago, but he didn't tell Darlene. Of course. I suppose he didn't want to mention it; you know how he is. So he's just been doing without, and now his head's killing him, and the chest pains, and—"

"_Chest pains?_" Donna all but shrieked into the phone. "CHEST PAINS? Have you called the doctor? Does he need an ambulance? Is he—?"

"Oh, don't worry," Margaret said, reassuringly. "He'll be all right. It's just the usual, he says. But it's gotten worse, of course, since he hasn't been taking his meds, and—"

"How do you know he's all right?" Donna interrupted her. "Has the doctor seen him?" There was a doctor on duty at the White House twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, just in case the President needed one. He wasn't supposed to be called on for other people's problems except in an emergency, but this had to count as an emergency.

"I told you," Margaret said, as patiently as Donna a minute or two before. "It's just the usual."

"The usual?" Donna echoed, blankly. She had no idea what Margaret was talking about. Chest pains were definitely not her idea of what was usual for Josh; he'd never had them before that she knew of, except when he was recovering from his surgery, and that had all healed up long ago.

"You know," Margaret said, lowering her voice. "The usual. Because of—his thing."

"His thing," Donna repeated, stupidly. Her mind didn't seem to be working properly; she couldn't piece this together at all. All she could think of was that Josh was having chest pains. But he was all right. Because this was usual; Josh having chest pains was usual. She wanted to scream at someone until she understood, but there wasn't any point in screaming at Margaret; she knew her too well to think she'd find out anything any faster that way.

"What happened to him." Margaret said. "After—he was shot." Her voice sounded hushed when she said it, almost reverential. In some corner of her mind, Donna realized that Margaret had come to feel the same kind of devotion to Josh that she had to Leo, and would probably lay down her life for him if anyone ever asked her to. Donna had felt the same way about him herself, until she'd become so angry with him two years ago.

"I knew he'd had problems, of course," Margaret went on. "Leo had me make the arrangements for that man from ATVA. But I hadn't realized stress was still something he had to worry about, or that it did this to him, until he told me."

Donna felt stunned. She hadn't realized, either. She'd known his PTSD wasn't considered entirely curable, of course—she'd researched it thoroughly at the time—but he'd improved very quickly after he'd started therapy for it, and had gotten so much better that she never thought about it anymore. He'd been on medication for a while, but he hadn't liked it and had been able to phase it out gradually; the last couple of years she'd been working for him, he hadn't been on anything at all. Even when he'd been at his lowest, after Carrick's resignation, when Leo had been so angry with him and had dealt with him so unfairly, he hadn't had any recurrence of the symptoms that she'd known of.

That she'd known of. "You've got health and strength," she remembered saying to him once, years ago, and she wondered now if he'd been keeping something from her then, or when he had started to. His job as Chief of Staff was highly stressful, of course, but she hadn't thought he was having any real problems because of it except the broken sleep, which was nothing unusual for him. And yet Margaret spoke as if he'd been dealing with difficult symptoms for some time. "The usual." How could this be usual, and she not know about it?

"He's having—a flashback?" she asked, worriedly. "To—the shooting?"

"No, no," Margaret said. "Not that. It isn't the bullet wound that's hurting him now; it's that pain right across his chest, that keeps him from breathing properly; he was doubled over in that little room off the Sit Room when he paged me, but of course he'd told me this could happen sometimes, and it's just a reaction to stress."

Her tone was reassuring, but Donna couldn't find anything comforting in her words._ Chest pains. _Donna's own chest tightened at the thought, her heart pounding painfully against her ribs and the blood thudding in her ears.

"You're sure he's all right?" she asked again, anxiously. "How do you know it isn't serious? That he isn't—" She couldn't say it. She thought of Leo, and spots started to dance before her eyes.

"We have a signal," Margaret said solemnly.

"_What?_" The spots danced a little harder, and her ears rang. She couldn't have heard that right.

"A signal," Margaret said again, very seriously. "A hand-signal. If he needs a doctor, he uses the hand-signal. It was my idea, the first day, when he told me. That way I know when it's serious and when it's not."

Donna shook her head to clear it. "But—" she started, and then stopped, because whatever crazy scheme Margaret might have dreamed up, she didn't want to hear about it now. She wanted to get what Josh needed as fast as she could. Then, if the meds didn't help, she'd call a doctor herself.

"You said he keeps his medications in the office, but he's run out?" she asked, as briskly as possible, trying to keep the faintness she was feeling out of her voice. "What does he need right now?"

"All of them," Margaret answered, discomfortingly.

"He has them at home?" Donna didn't like admitting that she didn't know, but she wasn't taking any chances. "Or does he need the prescriptions filled?"

"He says he has enough at home. But if you could find me the prescriptions, too, I could get them filled. I should keep them here, really. I've been asking him to bring them in, but he never remembers, and I didn't want to go through his desk at home when it's yours, too. . . ."

"Yes," Donna said, cutting her off. "Right. His meds, and his prescriptions."

"Just the meds now; I'll get the prescriptions from you later. He really needs to take something soon."

And we've been wasting all this time talking, Donna thought fiercely, slamming her phone shut and shoving it into her purse as she ran out of the building into the rain. Greg followed her at a trot.

"I'll drive," she said, sliding into the driver's seat and starting the car. She had the car moving before Greg had had time to do his seat belt up. She sped through every light on Pennsylvania Avenue, going through at least two of them after the yellow changed to red, and zipped around Washington Circle at a rate that had taxi-drivers honking at her as she cut them off while changing lanes.

She made it home five minutes sooner than she'd ever managed before, slipped into the parking-place in front that was marked "Permit Holder Only"—the permit was held by the Secret Service, which had infuriated all Josh's neighbors by taking over several parking places on his side of the street—and dashed up the stairs, ignoring Greg and forgetting to nod at the agent who was sitting in the car behind hers, watching the house in what was supposed to be an unobtrusive manner. Her hand was trembling so much she could barely get the key in the lock.

Inside, she headed for the bathroom and rifled through the medicine cabinet, but, as she'd thought, there was nothing there—Josh had cleared it out for her when she'd moved in, and all he kept there now was his razor, deodorant, and a comb. She looked under the sink, but it was empty except for her supply of pads and tampons, and the usual clutter of scrubbing brushes and cleansers. There was nothing in the two-piece off their bedroom, either. The desk in the living room yielded nothing; neither did his drawers in the bureau or nightstand in the bedroom. The kitchen cabinets were equally unhelpful, and she knew there was nothing lurking in the fridge.

She had to take two or three deep breaths to steady herself and force down her rising sense of panic; it reminded her what stress could feel like even when a person didn't have a stress disorder. After a minute's thought she went back to the bathroom and opened the cupboard where the towels were kept, pulling them out and looking between them. On the bottom, in the narrow space under the very lowest shelf, she found the black, zipped toiletries bag Josh used when he was traveling. Inside it was a bottle of Tylenol Extra-Strength and several vials of prescription medications, all of them nearly empty. She bit her lip when she saw the labels: one was a bottle of sleeping pills; one was for high blood pressure; another, an anti-depressant.

She felt bewildered: why had Josh needed to go back on this regimen again? When had it started? And why hadn't he told her? She hadn't known he was taking anything, although she'd been living with him all this time. If Margaret hadn't called her, there was no reason she ever would have known: of all the places in the apartment where he could have kept his supplies, he'd chosen one of the most inconspicuous spots, where she'd be least likely to come across them.

It flickered across her mind that that wouldn't always have been true: two years ago, it had been her regular business to dig out his travel bags and check to see that they had everything in them he might need. But that was Margaret's business now. The thought that it was Margaret's business, not hers, and that Margaret had known what Josh needed when she hadn't gave her a strange pang, but she didn't have time to think about any of that now. She zipped the bottles back into their discreet case and headed for her car, slamming the door behind her. Greg followed, asking no questions, as usual.

Margaret got to her feet when she came into the office.

"Oh, thank goodness," she said, with a sigh of relief, almost grabbing the bag from Donna's hand; she shook the bottles out of it and left with them before Donna could say anything at all. Donna waited, wondering and worrying. She couldn't follow; the Sit Room and its environs were off-limits to all but a few of the West Wing staff.

"Is he all right?" she asked anxiously, when Margaret finally reappeared.

"He will be now," Margaret said, beaming. "Thanks for getting them for me." She opened a drawer and transferred a few tablets from each bottle into the containers she had there, then put the original bottles back in their bag and handed it to Donna.

"That should be enough for the next day or two, but if you could find those prescriptions for me, I'll get them filled. He should have a supply here and at home. He doesn't seem to want to carry them in his backpack, for some reason."

"I'll find them tonight."

"Thanks so much, Donna. I really appreciate it."

Donna nodded, relieved, but still worried. She waited for a minute, hoping Margaret would say something more, but Josh's assistant was already shuffling through the papers on her desk, and seemed to be giving all her attention to that.

"I'd better get back," Donna said at last, starting for the door.

"Donna," Margaret said then, in a strained sort of voice. Donna turned back, and raised her eyebrows questioningly. "Donna, please—"

"What, Margaret?" Donna asked, curiously. Margaret was still fussing with the papers; she seemed positively nervous.

"You—won't tell Josh I called you, will you? Please. He'd have an absolute fit if he found out. I was just so busy—I couldn't get away—and I didn't think you'd want him to have to wait any longer, when it was as bad as that. You—you didn't mind, did you?"

Donna stared at her. She and Margaret had always gotten along so well.

"Of course I didn't mind, Margaret. How could I? What are you talking about?"

Margaret looked relieved.

"That's good," she said. "I didn't really think you would, but Josh has made such a thing about it. He read me the riot act our very first day in office: you weren't his assistant anymore; I mustn't ask you to do things you used to do for him if I got busy, or bother you with anything for him. He was _fierce_ about it. I don't know why—I know how important your job for the First Lady is; I wouldn't think of disturbing you ordinarily. I just thought, this one time—the whole staff is going crazy with this thing in Kazakhstan; he's been sleeping on a cot down there, just a couple of hours a night; the Joint Chiefs have been doing the same. He hasn't let this kind of thing stop him the other times, but it was starting to show—he had to leave the Sit Room while one bout passed; the President noticed, and asked if he was all right. I found him in that little side room down there, just doubled over and waiting it out. That's when he asked me to go back to the apartment and get what he needed, but the phone's been ringing off the hook, and this place has been like Grand Central Station—he's been so busy down there, he has no idea—and I just thought, this one time. . . ."

Donna felt her mouth tremble, and a hot, burning sensation well up at the back of her eyes.

"It's all right, Margaret," she said, her voice shaking a little. "I won't tell him you asked me."

Margaret smiled then, happy with relief. "Thank you," she said. "I knew you'd understand, Donna. It would just drive him wild. And more stress really isn't what he needs right now, is it?"

"No," Donna agreed. "It isn't." And she hurried out of the office as quickly as she could.

oooooo


	20. Chapter 20

There was no point in going back to her office. She'd taken the afternoon off to see Louisa; it was dinnertime now, and everyone else in the East Wing would have left. Donna went back to her car and let Greg drive her home. The storm had ended, but the heat and humidity were as bad as ever. Her head was pounding. She went back to the bathroom and took some Tylenol from her own supply. If only, she thought as she washed them down, they could fix the things that really hurt. But life wasn't that easy; all the pills in the world couldn't make some of the things that really mattered right. All they did was let you put the hard stuff on hold for a little while. But when the drug wore off, it was all still there.

She looked around the bathroom, remembering the times Josh had retreated to it when they'd been arguing or something had gone wrong. She wondered if the long showers had helped him relax while he was waiting for an attack to pass, or if they'd just been an excuse, a cover for the time he was taking—or for any sound he might make.

Presumably he took the anti-depressants every day and it was only the last few days he'd missed, because he'd been called into the office just when his supply had run down and Margaret had been gone and wasn't able to fill it. But Margaret had mentioned other occasions when he'd had trouble. Had he somehow run out of the medications then, too? Or had there been times when the stress he'd been under had just been more than the medication would handle? Had he told his doctor about them? Margaret had said something about his dosage getting increased, so presumably he had. But what had brought the attacks on in the first place? And was he doing everything he ought to to manage the stress?

He was eating regularly, sleeping well enough most of the time—though it looked as though he'd been taking medication to achieve that, too. He worked out every morning, but maybe he needed to spend more time at it, or to try to get some exercise outdoors—that was supposed to be more calming, wasn't it? And then there was therapy—was he going to that? It had helped him before, she remembered, and he'd been more willing to talk to Stanley Keyworth or one of the therapists Stanley had recommended than he had been to continue the medications: they'd had side-effects he didn't like, and he'd always said he hated them. But was he doing it now? It was hard to imagine when he was fitting it in, if he was. And how long had all this been going on? And—the most miserable question of all—why had he never told her? He had told Margaret, but he hadn't told her. . . .

Her head was still aching. Feeling more than a little sick, she sat down at the desk she and Josh shared and started looking through it for his prescriptions so she could get them filled. She wasn't going to leave that to Margaret; she'd drop them off at the pharmacy herself in the morning. She finally found them, stuffed in a drawer. She sat for a long time, staring at them: one set had been written in late November, and the other, as Margaret had said, just over a month ago. Just after their beautiful trip to Barbados, and just after the trip to New York.

She put her head in her hands, trying to make it stop hurting so much; the Tylenol didn't seem to be doing any good. She needed to be able to think clearly, but she'd never felt so confused. She felt as if someone had dumped five or six jigsaw puzzles together, emptied the pieces in front of her, and told her to put them together into one big picture: they simply wouldn't fit. Nothing wanted to fit together. Nothing at all.

Everything had seemed so wonderful until a few weeks ago. She'd had everything she wanted: a high-profile job, plenty of responsibility, reasonable work hours, an apartment in Georgetown, Josh. Especially Josh. And then it had all changed in a minute, and Josh had started to slip away from her, and she hadn't been able to get him to tell her what was happening, and she hadn't been sure why. She still wasn't sure. She thought she could see parts of the picture, but then she would try to fit the other parts in and the first ones would slip and slide away, like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope that cover each other up and then uncover and recover themselves in different ways, but never let you see all of them together in a completely finished pattern, a solid whole.

She closed her eyes, and the pictures of Josh at Rosslyn danced before them again. The blood—so much blood; his shirt covered with it; his hands covered with it too, pressed against his chest, as if he was trying to hold the blood or the pain in. For all the times she'd thought about what had happened to him there, that was a detail she'd never pictured. Remembering the look on his face—agonized, desperate, alone—she wanted to be sick. The thought of that gangling, feckless boy taking that picture made her feel sicker still; it wasn't the sort of moment that ought to be recorded for people to look at and talk about. And how could anyone see someone else struggling like that and just stand still and take pictures without trying to help?

And then Josh's eyes closing—Thor's intrusive telephoto had actually caught them half-shut—and Toby catching him and lowering him to the ground and holding him there. She wondered if he'd let himself go then because Toby was there and he wasn't alone anymore. She wondered if he'd thought, as he let go, that that was the last thing he was going to see. Toby and C.J. and Sam had thought so, she was sure: she could see it on their stricken faces, as Thor had said.

Toby and C.J. and Sam, kneeling beside him, holding him, trying to comfort him as he was bleeding, they would have thought dying, in their arms. Toby and C.J. and Sam, not her. It should have been her. It should have been her. She should have been there, she thought desperately; she should never have left him and gone home that night. It should have been her with him, not them. She shouldn't have left him. She shouldn't have left him. . . . Not then. . . . Not ever. . . .

She had to stop thinking like this, or she'd go crazy, and no amount of talk to Louisa would be able to help her. Not that she had much faith left in Louisa's brand of therapy, anyway. Perhaps Josh was right, and you had to be willing to pay for the right person. Someone smarter than you were, he'd said once, and she'd laughed at him for thinking like that, but now she wondered if she should have paid more attention to how her therapist thought about things before she'd been willing to hand her life over to her to be dissected and analyzed and changed. Though it wasn't exactly IQ that she'd finally realized was missing in Louisa; it was something else, something warmer and more emotional. EQ, maybe.

Once Donna had thought that her own real strengths lay, not so much in her talent for organization or her excellent memory, as in her sensitivity and compassion, her emotional awareness. Her heart. But somewhere along the line she'd stopped letting herself feel as much. She'd stopped quite deliberately after Gaza, really, because feeling that way was what had tied her to Josh, whose needs she had once been almost painfully aware of, and to cut herself free from him, she'd had to cut herself off from feeling those things, or from feeling them so acutely. But something about the last few days had woken her up to the importance of letting herself feel that way again. How Louisa could have expected her to sit there and talk about _herself_ when Josh might need her—when, it had turned out, he _did _ need her, badly—she couldn't imagine.

She knew she was being a little unfair to the therapist, who—as she had pointed out—could only deal with the issues of the patient in front of her. But why couldn't Louisa understand that Josh's well-being was as important to Donna as her own, that she couldn't have one without the other? There had been a coldness in the therapist's manner when Margaret first called, a flash of impatience in her eyes when Donna wanted to answer, that Donna still found chilling to remember. No, she didn't think she wanted to go back to see Louisa D'Amato again, no matter how confused or upset she might feel.

And she felt very confused and upset right now. She had to do _something, _had to try to get some answers to the questions that seemed to be pounding away inside her skull as if they were trying to break it open. She couldn't wait for Josh to come home and talk to her; he might be stuck in the Sit Room for days, and she'd be useless to Mrs. Santos while she was feeling like this. She had to do something, she had to. And she had to do it now.

Josh had always been fairly well-organized about his finances. He had his check registers and his Visa statements and the receipts he needed for his taxes all gathered together in bundles in one drawer, and his most important papers, including his back tax returns, stored in file folders in another. Donna had never had anything to do with that part of his life, and she knew she was probably crossing a line somewhere by looking through his records for anything except the prescriptions Margaret had asked her for, but she was too distressed really to care.

It was her desk too, she told herself; she was living with him now; she had some sort of right to look through it, didn't she? But the reality was that she didn't really care whether she had a right to or not. He was her boyfriend, her lover, her partner, the man she was sharing her life with, the man she loved—had always loved, ever since she'd met him—and he was hurting and sick, and she had to find out why, and what he was doing about it besides taking pills, and how long he'd been going on like this, and why he hadn't told her. She simply had to.

An hour later, though, she was more confused and distressed than ever. She sat staring at the papers spread out before her, trying to put together the pieces of what she'd found, and what she hadn't. What she hadn't found was what she'd really been hoping for—something, anything, to contradict the damning testimony of those prescriptions and their dates. What she had found was, in some ways, more than she could have hoped for—but it brought tears to her eyes and made her heart ache.

On top of everything else that had happened over the past few days, it was more than she could bear. She put her head down on the desk top and the papers—the bills and Visa statements and cancelled checks; the neat little stack of correspondence with the insurance company that she and Josh, like every other White House employee, had always shared; the gift certificate for three days and three nights at the most luxurious spa resort on the Eastern Shore, purchased early in December two years before and made out in her name, with a little note written across it in Josh's hand, telling her it had been a rough year but he hoped she'd take a long weekend in the new one and go and relax and enjoy herself, because nobody deserved it more—and cried.


	21. Chapter 21

It was after one in the morning when Josh finally dragged himself up the steps to the apartment and let himself in. He was surprised to find a light on, and Donna curled up on the couch, the coffee-table in front of her covered with papers. She opened her eyes when he came in, and he saw that they were red and swollen, and her face splotchy, as if she had been crying. He felt his chest constrict, as if someone had suddenly started to tighten an iron band around it so he couldn't breathe properly.

"Donna?" he said, dropping his backpack onto the floor. "Why are you still up? What's the matter?"

"Oh, Josh," she said plaintively, sitting up. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, of course I am," he said, bemusedly. "Pretty tired, but it's all over now, and the world hasn't come to an end and probably won't for a while yet—"

"Why didn't you tell me?" she burst out. "Oh Josh, why didn't you _tell_ me?"

The iron band tightened a little more.

"I'm sorry I couldn't call, Donna!" He was still standing in the door, watching her with something like desperation in his eyes. "It's been just crazy. But Margaret should have—"

"Not _that,_" she said, waving a hand in the air as if to brush aside Kazakhstan and the Sit Room and Josh's four nights and five days away from home as insignificant trivialities. "Not _that!_"

"Then—what?"

Her lower lip trembled.

"That you—that you—oh, _Josh_!"

She got up suddenly and ran towards him, throwing her arms around him and burying her face in his neck. He closed his arms around her automatically and held her to him tightly, swaying a little with exhaustion as he did.

"Shhh," he said, softly. "Shhh, Donna, shhhh."

"Oh, Josh," she said again, into his neck. "Oh, Josh."

"What's the matter, Donna? What's wrong?"

"You . . . you . . ." She couldn't get the words out. He pushed her gently towards the sofa and sank into it beside her, rubbing a hand over his face to try to wipe the tiredness away.

"I'm sorry I haven't been home, Donna! I hated being away from you for so long, but we knew this would happen sometimes. And I'm sorry I haven't been able to call. I wanted to, but there just hasn't been a minute; every time I took my cell phone out, someone would grab me for something. But I told Margaret to keep you posted—she did, didn't she?"

"Not at first," Donna said.

"You're _kidding!"_

"It's all right. Teddy was sick, and her sister was away until today; she had to go on leave, and Darlene forgot, I guess, or didn't understand. But it's okay. I knew something big was happening—the whole building knew that—and that was why I hadn't heard from you."

"Damn it, I've told Margaret _always_ to let you know if I can't get away. The others are supposed to know that, too. I'm sorry, Donna—"

"It's all right, Josh. Don't be angry with her, please. It wasn't her fault."

"But what's wrong, then? You seemed upset about something just now."

"I was," she said. "I am."

Josh took a deep breath, and dropped his eyes dropped to the floor.

"What did I do?" he asked, roughly. "I mean, what _else _did I do, besides that?"

"You didn't _do_ anything," Donna said. "But—oh, Josh! You haven't been well. And you never told me. I didn't realize, I didn't know, so I haven't been helping, I haven't been doing anything—oh Josh, why didn't you _tell_ me you haven't been feeling well?"

He glanced up at her for a moment, and then away.

"I haven't been sick, Donna," he said, rubbing a hand over his face again. "I'm fine. Pretty tired, after the last few days, but otherwise I'm fine."

"You're not. You know you're not. You've been having headaches, bad ones. And chest pains—_chest pains,_ Josh! Margaret said—"

"_Margaret_ said?" Josh ground out. "She's not supposed to—"

He stood up abruptly and walked across the room to the window, the need to move suddenly much greater than the exhaustion he'd been feeling just moments ago.

"_Damn it!_" he said, slapping his hand against the window-frame, "Can't anyone in that place do _anything _I ask them to?"

Donna winced. She hadn't meant to break Margaret's confidence. But it was too late to go back now.

"Please don't be angry, Josh. She didn't have any choice—you'd run out of your medications there, and she couldn't leave the office to get them, things were so busy, so she called me—"

"She's _not supposed_ to call you!"

"I thought you said she was supposed to call me any time you couldn't make it home?"

"For _that!_" Josh turned around, gripping the window-frame as if for support. "For _that!_ To let you know when I can't be home for dinner, so you won't have to wait for me! Not for other things. It's _her _job to take care of all that stuff; she's not supposed to bother you with it, she knows that!"

"Josh—"

"I'm sorry, Donna! I'm sorry! She shouldn't have done that. I've told her not to do that; I'll talk to her tomorrow and make sure it doesn't happen again."

"Josh, what are you talking about? Of course she should have called me. Why ever not?"

"You know why not, Donna. You're busy. You have more important things to worry about; I promised you I wouldn't bother you with things like that anymore—"

"You were _sick,, _Josh! You think I don't want to know about _that_?"

"I wasn't sick_, _Donna! It was nothing, it's not important—"

"It wasn't nothing! Margaret said you had to leave the Sit Room. She said you were doubled over; you couldn't breathe. . . ."

"I could breathe. I just had to take a few minutes—"

"You needed your medication."

"It helps, but I don't _need_ it. I don't even _want _it. I hate the damn stuff, I just—"

"I know you do. I know you hate it. I thought you'd gone off it years ago, Josh—why did you have to start up again? And why didn't you tell me?"

He leaned against the window-frame. His face was pale, and he was breathing hard.

"Donna, don't make a thing out of this. I'm not _sick_. It's not that big a deal; it's not going to kill me; it's just—just—you know what it is."

"The PTSD?"

He hesitated, nodded briefly, and looked away.

"A flashback?"

He bit his lip, and hesitated again before answering.

"No. Not—like what you're thinking, Donna; not like before. I know where I am; I've got it under control. I'm not going to freak out and do anything I shouldn't. There's nothing to worry about; it's no big deal."

"Margaret said you'd had attacks like this before. Since she's been working for you."

"It's not a big deal."

"She said you warned her about it, on her first day. So you'd done this before. Recently enough that you thought you might do it again, not just years ago."

He shrugged.

"A couple of times. It's nothing."

"Did you see a doctor, Josh? Are you sure you're not—not—" She couldn't finish.

"Going to have a heart attack? I'm fine, Donna, I told you. Yes, I've seen a doctor about it. It's just a reaction to stress. It's nothing to worry about."

"But that kind of reaction to stress has to be bad for you! And you're in pain. When it happens, you're in pain."

Donna's voice was distressed. She couldn't bear the idea of Josh being in pain. It had been so terrible to watch, after Rosslyn. . . .

"It doesn't matter." He was pacing across the room now. "It's not _real._ And the medication helps."

"When you have it. You'd run out."

"I'm sorry! You shouldn't have had to go for it. I'll make sure you don't ever have to again."

"That's okay, Josh; I didn't mind that. Of course I didn't mind it. Why would you ever think I would mind?"

Josh ran his hand through his hair, and dropped onto the couch again, shaking his head and looking completely bemused.

"_Why, _Josh? _Tell me—_why?"

"You said—" he started, huskily. "I thought—you didn't want to bother with things like that anymore."

Donna stared at him, wide-eyed with disbelief.

"_Why, _Josh? I said something? What did I say? When?"

"That last night in Barbados. You know. You said you didn't want me to treat you like my assistant anymore."

Donna swallowed, hard.

"You thought I meant—about things like this?"

"I thought you meant about everything. You said so. You said you'd gotten sick of having to look after me; you didn't want to be my assistant any more at all. I promised I wouldn't do that to you any more. And I've tried to keep that promise, Donna, I really have. I told Margaret not to bother you with anything for me. That's her job; you have a more important job now—"

"Oh, Josh," Donna said, swallowing another lump and trying to keep from crying. "I didn't mean—I never thought—and anyway, Margaret doesn't do it right. She let your prescriptions run down, Josh; she should be keeping track, making sure you've always got enough on hand—"

A hint of a smile crossed Josh's face.

"Of course she's not as good at it as you were, Donna," he said, softly. "Nobody could be as good at looking after me as you were. But she's not that bad, you know; today was my fault, really. She's been asking me for months to bring in my prescriptions, and I keep forgetting. And then I ran out."

Donna sniffed.

"Of course you forgot," she said. "You've got too many other things to worry about every day, and you never do take the time to think about yourself. That's why you need someone to—oh, Josh, I'm sorry! I'm sorry I made you think I didn't want to do anything to help you. I never meant that. I meant—I don't know what I meant, really, what I was afraid of. Just—that you wouldn't take me seriously, I guess. I was afraid of that."

"Of course I take you seriously, Donna!" Josh said, startled. He wasn't smiling anymore. "Why would you doubt that?"

"I was your _secretary,_ Josh!"

"My secretary?Donna, you were never my secretary. You were always my assistant, always, right from the start."

"It's a pretty title for the same thing, Josh."

"Donna, how can you say that?"

"I answered your telephones. I did your filing. I kept your schedule—that's what a secretary does."

"You did those things because that's part of what a White House assistant has to do, Donna, but you did so much more than that. You researched issues for me all the time. You—I can't believe you don't know how much more you were to me than just a secretary. You were like my _partner,_ damn it! My junior partner, maybe, but not just my secretary; never just that. We worked _together._ I always thought we were working together. For Leo. For the administration. For the President."

Donna thought she was going to cry again.

"Oh, Josh," she said. "How can you say that? I know you let me do some research for you, and I'm grateful for that, I learned a lot from it, I really did. But I had to work so hard to prove myself to you. You couldn't believe Will had given me a real job; you thought he was just using me to get at you. Make-work, you said—you thought he'd given me _make-work._ You didn't want to hire me when I came to you for a job after the convention. You were furious when Lou did."

"Oh, God, Donna," Josh cried, his voice agonized. "I'm sorry I said those things; I'm sorry. I was angry that you'd left like that. I was—it bothered me, a lot. And—I couldn't deal with having you come back like that, and having to be with you all the time, and wondering why you'd done it and when you were going to leave again. I—"

"I left so I could get a better job, Josh!" Donna said, not entirely truthfully.

"But—like that? You didn't tell me. You didn't give notice, or _anything._ You just—left. After all those years, you just left. You didn't let me do anything, to try to stop you or to help you or—or anything."

The iron band around his chest seemed to have pulled tighter; he was almost panting with the effort to breathe. Donna didn't notice; the anger that had been simmering deep down in her all this time suddenly bubbled to the surface, flooding every other thought away in the heat of the moment.

"I tried to! I asked you to have lunch with me _seven times,_ Josh! You kept canceling. You couldn't have found a clearer way to say, 'You don't matter, Donna,' if you'd thought about it for months beforehand!"

"I'm sorry!" he said wildly. "I'm sorry! I screwed up. I know I screwed that up; I screwed everything up. But it wasn't because you didn't matter, Donna! Of course you mattered! You—you—"

And then the pain came. It knocked what breath was left out of him. He put a hand to his chest involuntarily, and bent over, gasping. Donna's eyes flew wide.

"Josh! Josh—what's wrong? What—?" Then she realized. She started to run towards the bathroom for what was left of his medications, but stopped, realizing he must have already had all he could of them that day.

"Can you take anything?" she asked, hoping she was wrong.

Josh shook his head, still unable to speak. His face grimaced in pain. He was still holding his chest—not low and on the side, where the bullet had hit him, but higher up. Where his heart was, Donna thought, panicking.

"I'll call 911," she said, desperately, but he shook his head so violently that she thought he was going to make himself pass out.

"'S'all right," he gasped. "I'll be—all right—in a minute."

Not knowing what else to do, she sat down again beside him and rubbed his back.

"Sorry," he said, still breathlessly.

"It's all right, Josh. It's all right. I'm so sorry; I didn't mean to make you upset. All that stuff doesn't matter any more, Josh; it really doesn't matter any more at all."

After a few minutes his breathing grew quieter. He leaned back against the sofa cushions, his face white and beaded with sweat, and closed his eyes. Donna couldn't rub his back any more, so she took his hand in hers and squeezed it. He turned his over so he could squeeze back. His grip was fainter than usual. She felt another spurt of fear.

"Josh," she said, hesitantly, after a minute. "You've got to see someone about this. This isn't right."

"I have," he said, without opening his eyes. "I told you. I have."

"What did they say?"

"That I have a stress disorder."

"That's all?"

"More or less."

"You can't keep going in this job if stress makes you do this, Josh. You've got to find a better way to handle it, or you're going to have to quit."

"I can handle the job, Donna. The job doesn't—it's not the problem, I—I don't do this that often. And not on the job; it's never been like this on the job before today. I'm just tired. It's been a hell of a few days."

Donna thought for a minute. Then she said, quietly,

"Josh, you haven't been going to therapy for this, have you?"

"Donna—"

"You haven't, have you?"

"No," he said, sounding very tired. "No, I haven't."

"Why not, Josh? It could help, couldn't it? The attacks might not be so bad if you were doing it. You had good people to go to; it helped you before."

"I haven't had time."

"You need to _make_ the time, Josh."

"Right," he said, wearily. "How, Donna? Out of what? This job takes every waking minute when I'm not with you, you know that. And we need time together. When I don't absolutely have to be somewhere else, I need to be here with you. That's what you said you wanted, and it's what I want, too."

"I didn't mean every second, Josh! Of course, if you need time to go to therapy—"

"I don't _need_ it, Donna! I told you, I'm fine, I've got this under control. I know what they'll tell me, anyway; I know what I'm supposed to be doing to deal with this. I've done it before."

"I thought it had stopped."

"It did, for a while. Then it started up again. But it's different this time; I don't lose track of where I am or what's going on; I don't lose control and do things I shouldn't. I don't need to go back to Keyworth's guys and get them to tell me all the same stuff all over again."

"They might—" Her voice faltered. "Wouldn't you be able—to talk—about what's—really causing this? What the real problem is?"

"The real problem? Donna, I have PTSD; I process stress differently than other people do; that's the real problem. I've seen therapists about it; they've told me how to deal with it; I'm doing those things, as well as I possibly can. There's nothing more they can tell me. It's not worth going back to be told the same things all over again, even if I had time—"

"But you're having these attacks!"

"I have a stressful job, Donna. I have a stressful life. There's nothing I can do about that except deal with it, which is what I've been doing. It's fine—"

"But—" Donna wrinkled her forehead. There had to be some way to make things better; Josh couldn't just go on like this. The medications alone obviously weren't enough.

"Donna, trust me, it would just be a waste of time. And money. Do you have any idea how much Keyworth and his pals cost? My insurance doesn't even begin to cover it."

"That doesn't matter. Not if it would help."

"Of _course_ it matters! I—"

And he stopped, and swallowed.

"Why, Josh? Why does it matter?" Donna asked, surprised. Josh had never worried much about money, as far as she knew. His government salary had never been particularly large, but he wasn't a big spender, and his father had left him something, she knew, though she had no idea how much. She'd only looked at his check registers and credit card statements that evening when she'd been trying to find out whether he'd been going to therapy or not; she hadn't touched his tax records, or the ones from his savings accounts or investments.

He sat up a little, and started fidgeting with the binding around the edge of a sofa cushion.

"I—" he started again, and swallowed.

"Why, Josh?"

"I—"

"Josh! What's the matter?"

He ran his hands through his hair, and bent over again, not looking at her.

"I'm sorry, Donna. I guess I should have told you this before, but—"

"But _what,_ Josh?"

He swallowed again.

"I—you know Matt didn't have much money for the campaign at first. I took a pretty big salary cut to work on it. But I still had this place to keep up, and expenses—the travel was pretty steep for a while there, until we got the nomination. After that I took expenses, but . . . well . . ."

"You didn't increase your _salary_?" Donna was stunned.

He looked embarrassed.

"I couldn't, Donna. We needed every penny for the campaign. I was having to make the most ridiculous calls on ad buys; we almost lost Illinois because there wasn't enough to do everything we needed. I—"

"Josh," Donna said, almost sternly. "What were you getting?"

He scuffed at the carpet with his shoe.

"I, um . . ."

"Josh!"

"I—nothing, basically."

"_Nothing!_"

"You can't contribute more than a thousand in cash to a campaign, but you can donate your time."

"So you donated yours?"

"I wanted us to win, Donna. I really, really wanted us to win."

Donna stared at him for a moment, stunned.

"How much—did it cost you?"

"A couple of hundred."

"Thousand?"

"Yeah. The travel, hotels. . . ."

"_Josh!_"

"I know," he sighed. "But I didn't know what else to do. We needed every dollar we could get. I figured I'd make it up later. It didn't clean me out—I've still got some investments, and the apartment, of course. And my salary, though that's not much more than I was making before. We'll be all right in the long run; I'll have plenty of opportunities after we leave the White House; I should be able to make some real money then. And we're all right now. But we're not going to go on being all right unless I can save some money. You're not going to want to stay in this apartment; it's too small, I know that; you're going to want a house. You should have a house. I'd like to get us a nice one, but you know what that means: we'll get a good price for the condo, but it won't even begin to cover the cost of a house in a decent neighborhood—"

"Josh!" Donna said again, sounding as stunned as she felt.

He didn't seem to notice, but just kept talking as if she hadn't said anything.

"And it's got to _be_ a decent neighborhood, Donna! Even if we could afford a place around here, this isn't where we'll want to be. You know what the District schools are like, even here; we'd have to go private, and that's another twenty or thirty thousand a year, at least. And there aren't any parks or places to play outside, or that many kids to play with. We should probably look at Bethesda or Chevy Chase, where we can still get downtown fairly easily but there's some green stuff around the houses and the schools are pretty good. Though even then, I'm not sure they'll be good enough—"

Donna's mouth was hanging open now.

"But Bethesda's through the roof now, you know that, and Chevy Chase is worse. And before that—there's the ring, I want to be able to get you a really nice one. And the wedding—your parents shouldn't have to pay for that. And the honeymoon. That trip in November cost plenty, and a honeymoon should be nicer than that. I want it to be the best—"

"_Josh?_" It came out as a strangled squeak. "A wedding? Honeymoon? Schools?"

He stared at her, startled, as if he hadn't really realized that he'd been talking out loud.

"I—" he said again, and flushed to the roots of his hair. "I mean—if—you—decide—you want. . . ." His voice trailed away.

Donna's face was as scarlet as his.

"We haven't—you haven't ever—I didn't know you wanted—"

He bit his lip, which was trembling, but met her eyes steadily.

"Of course I want," he said, huskily. "Of course I want to marry you. I know you wanted time to decide how things were going, and I wasn't assuming anything, just trying to make sure we'd have what we'd need, if things work out and you say yes—"

She never knew later whether she leaned towards him first, or he leaned towards her, but somehow their lips met. After that neither of them could say anything else for a very long time.

"Does that mean yes?" he asked, a little shakily, when they both came up for air.

"Of course it does," she answered, her voice shaking too.

He pulled her to him and kissed her again. And again. And again. And again. . . .


	22. Chapter 22

"Josh?" Donna said, a while later.

They were still sitting on the couch, wrapped in each other's arms. Donna couldn't remember kissing anyone for as long as that since she was a teenager. Josh hadn't even tried to take it farther; she suspected he was simply too tired to manage it, though he wasn't showing any signs of falling asleep yet.

She herself had passed the point of exhaustion and moved into some sort of zone where sleep no longer seemed to matter, she was so exhilarated by what had just happened and what they were going to do. But she was beginning to come down from her high a little. She couldn't forget what had happened just before Josh had told her he wanted to marry her, or what Margaret had said had happened that afternoon, or all the things she'd been wondering about that evening while she waited for him to come home.

"Yes, sweetheart?" he replied, endearingly.

"Josh—I need to ask you something."

"Ask away."

Donna took a deep breath.

"When I took your medications in to Margaret this afternoon, she asked me to look for your prescriptions, too."

"I'm sorry," he said, automatically. "Really, I—"

"I don't mind, Josh; I told you."

This apologetic Josh was so different from the one she used to know, she thought; she would never have expected him to act like this. What on earth had happened to change him so?

"Thank you," he whispered, giving her waist a squeeze.

"I looked for them when I came home. I looked through your side of the desk. I hope you don't mind."

"Mind?" He sounded startled. "No, of course I don't mind. Why would I mind?"

"I found the prescriptions," Donna went on, without answering this. "I didn't find the other thing I was looking for, but I found something else."

"What else did you find? And what were you looking for?" Josh asked, sounding more puzzled than before.

"I was looking for something to tell me that you'd been going to therapy, or doing something to deal with this—with these attacks—before the dates on the prescriptions. I found some of your cancelled checks and old Visa bills."

Josh looked bewildered.

"My—checks? My Visa bills?" he asked.

Donna nodded.

"From two years ago," she said. "After Gaza."

His face flushed, and he dropped his eyes—understanding, embarrassed.

"Josh," she said, taking his arm and holding it tightly. "You paid for my mother's flight to Germany. You paid a fortune to fly her there and to fly there yourself. And then you paid all those bills for me that my insurance didn't want to cover—my private rooms, some of my therapy, even. I knew you'd dealt with them for me, but I thought you'd just handled the paperwork. I had no idea—I didn't know—"

"It's okay," he said, a little roughly. "Don't worry about it."

"Oh, Josh," she said, despairingly, "why did you do that? You were looking after me and my family and I didn't even know. Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't my mother tell me? She kept saying how wonderful you were,"—Josh blushed again—"but she never told me what you'd done. Did you ask her not to?"

Josh's face looked like it was going to burn off.

"Maybe," he muttered. "Yeah. Something like that."

"_Why,_ Josh? And—why did you fly all that way to see me like that? It cost you a fortune. I've never even thought about it before; I thought Leo sent you, the government paid. . . ."

He smiled a little through his embarrassment.

"Leo told me I could go. He said if I needed to be with you, everyone would understand. And I took off like a bat out of hell. I was being spectacularly useless, anyway, just freaking out and yelling at everyone about killing everyone who'd done that to you, everyone who'd had anything to do with it—or anyone else I could make pay for it somehow. The money was the last thing I was thinking about, and I don't want you to think about it, either. I'd have paid ten times that if paying it would have got me to you any faster, or would have made you all right when I got there. I'd have paid a hundred times for that. A thousand. Anything. . . ."

Donna buried her face in his chest, and he wrapped his arms around her and dropped his face into her hair. She could feel his heart beating against her, faster than usual, and his breath still coming a little too quickly.

"I didn't know you felt like that then," she whispered.

"Of course I felt like that," he answered, huskily. "I've always felt like that. You didn't, so I tried not to think about it. I even tried to convince myself I really didn't feel it, and sometimes I almost succeeded, but when you were hurt I couldn't lie to myself any more. I just had to get to you, no matter what you or anyone else thought. But I'd have given anything I had to be able to turn the clock back and make that not happen to you, Donna. I would. I really would."

Donna started to cry again, very softly.

"I did feel that way, Josh. I did. I always did. I even told you once. That night, in your office—do you remember? You'd sent me flowers for what you kept insisting was our anniversary, and I was angry with you for making fun of me about going back to Alan, and I told you how I hurt my ankle and he didn't come to get me for hours. And you said—"

"I remember," Josh said. "I said, if you were hurt, I wouldn't stop for a beer like he did."

"And I said, if you were hurt, I wouldn't stop for red lights."

"I know. I couldn't believe you'd said that. But I didn't think you meant it the way it sounded. I wondered, for a while, but I didn't want to assume—I couldn't really believe you'd mean that. And then we found out about the President's MS, and all hell broke loose, and then—you never said anything like that again, so I figured you hadn't meant anything by it, just that we were, you know, good friends."

"I did mean something by it, Josh."

"I'm sorry, Donna. I guess I screwed that up too. I've screwed a lot of things up for us. I just—I had to be your boss, you know? And that made it hard to know what to do."

"I didn't know," she said through her tears. "I didn't know you felt that way, too. I didn't know at all. And I didn't know you wanted _this. _What you said, just now. When did you decide, Josh? That you wanted to—marry me?" She hesitated, then said, more softly, "That you wanted us to have _children?_"

Josh scrubbed a hand over his face.

"I—I don't know, Donna. There've been lots of times when I've thought about it. I haven't always been sure I could deal with it. But then I got you, and I just knew I didn't want you to leave again, ever. I wanted you to feel the same. I—I didn't think you did."

"Oh, Josh, of course I did!"

"You _said,_ Donna! You said you didn't know what this was all about, what you wanted from it! That threw me; I didn't know what was going on with you, what you wanted, and—I wondered for a while if I was right to be thinking those things, about being together, making something of this. . . . Before we went away I told the President-Elect I didn't have a life, and I didn't know if that was because I wanted it that way or not, but really, I knew what I _wanted _then, I just didn't know if I could figure out how to make it happen, you know? Because I know I'm no good at talking about these things, and I always seem to make a mess of it with you somehow—"

"Oh Josh," Donna said, burying her face in his shoulder. "You haven't made a mess of it. Or not any more than I have. I didn't have any idea you were even close to thinking that way. I just assumed you weren't. But I guess that made it a lot harder for you, didn't it? My assuming. . . ."

"I guess I made it hard for you, too, Donna. You probably wanted a guy who'd have just sailed in there and asked you years ago, and taken a chance on your saying no. I wish I could be that guy. I just—"

"You just were that guy, Josh."

"It took me long enough. And I didn't do it very well, did I? I should have—"

"You did it beautifully. And I didn't make it easy for you, Josh."

"I—I was just afraid of screwing up what we did have, you know, Donna? By saying the wrong thing, or saying it in the wrong way or at the wrong time. I kept thinking maybe it was better just to keep going the way I was, because at least I knew how to do that and it worked, sort of. That's what I meant, when I said I didn't know if I wanted a life. But I did know. I just—I didn't know how to do it, you know? I didn't want one if you didn't want it with me, and I didn't know how to get you to want that."

"Oh, Josh. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry! I didn't know you felt that way. Even after you came to Germany, I thought it was just because Leo thought someone should. And I was so hateful to you that fall, before I left. . . ."

He squeezed a little tighter.

"You weren't hateful, Donna," he said. "You couldn't be hateful. I knew I must have done something to make you angry with me. But I didn't know what, or how to fix it, so I just tried to keep going and hoped it would fix itself."

"You didn't do anything. It was me, Josh—just me. I was frustrated and angry and hurting all over, and I just wanted things to be different. In my job. With you. Especially with you. But after I came back to work, you were acting as if everything was the same and would never change, and I got angry with you about that, which wasn't fair. There wasn't any way you could have known what I wanted. It wasn't your fault."

"That week before you left, when you wanted me to take you out to lunch, I—I was scared, Donna. I knew you were angry and I didn't know what I'd done, and I didn't really want to find out, because I didn't think I'd be able to make it all right any more. And I didn't want to take you out to _lunch,_" he added, a little bitterly.

"You—didn't?" Donna gulped, confused. "Why—?"

He'd paid for her hospital rooms and half her therapy and some very expensive last-minute plane tickets; why wouldn't he have wanted to take her out to lunch?

"I wanted to take you out to _dinner_, Donna. I wanted to book a table in the best restaurant in town, and take you out to dinner, and tell you how much you meant to me and how I couldn't bear to lose you—what it did to me when you got hurt and I thought I might lose you—and—and—how I felt about you. But you seemed so angry with me—you'd been so angry, ever since you came back from Germany—and you'd been seeing that Irish guy, that—" he choked a little—"that photographer guy, Ayres—and I thought I was the last man in the world you'd want to hear that from. I thought you'd probably slap me in the face or something, for daring to think of it. And then you'd quit, just so you didn't have to see me and think about me thinking about you like that. You'd leave. I kept telling myself, if I just kept pretending everything was okay, you'd stop being angry with me sometime, and then at least I wouldn't have driven you away and I'd still get to see you every day. I just didn't know what I was going to do if you left, Donna. I didn't think I could deal with that."

"I'm sorry, Josh!" Donna cried out, desperately. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you like that. I'm so, so sorry!"

"It's okay," he said, roughly, holding her as tightly as he possibly could without hurting her. "Just—don't go again, okay? Please, just don't go again."

"I won't, Josh. I promise. I won't. But, Josh—" grasping at the one thing in all that that she could do still do something about—"what do you mean, I'd been seeing Colin? I wasn't seeing Colin; I've told you that. I never went out with him. He was just a—a fling, a couple of nights in the hotel in Gaza. I never saw him after I left Germany, not until last summer, and that was just about the show."

Josh shook his head.

"You did tell me that a while ago," he admitted. "But I didn't know it _then._ I really thought you were with him, doing something long-distance, something like that. There were phone calls—and flowers—"

Donna remembered Josh pulling the phone out of her hand to shout at the man on the other end, and looking at the cards on her flowers. She'd thought he was just being rude and controlling. It had never crossed her mind that he'd been jealous.

"I hated that he gave you flowers and I couldn't. But I was your boss—what would people have said if I'd started giving you flowers, after all that? What would you have said? I could make a joke of it once, but after running out of the office in the middle of a crisis like that so I could be with you . . ."

Donna bit her lip. She'd thought he was deliberately avoiding sending romantic signals when he hadn't sent her flowers in the hospital. She'd never thought that he might be pulling back because he thought he'd already made his feelings obvious and she'd rejected them. She wondered how he could have believed that she'd ever prefer Colin Ayres to him. But the confidence—even over-confidence, at times—that he brought so naturally to his job had never really come into play around women, except as fairly transparent bravado. He'd always been positively awkward at first with the ones he liked. . . .

"I thought you said you did bring me some flowers? In the hospital, in Germany? You told me a while ago you brought me flowers, but something happened to them."

Josh flushed again.

"They were roses," he said, huskily. "I got you some roses. Red ones. They weren't that great—just hospital flowers—but they were all I could get, on the way back from that damn lunch Leo made me go to. I was kicking myself for not having thought of it before, until that Ayres guy came in with his great big stinking bouquet and kissed you and you thought he was so charming. I've never been any good with stuff like that; I just hadn't thought of it before. All I was thinking about was you, and wanting to see you wake up and talk to me."

"I'd rather have that than flowers, Josh."

"You should be able to have that _and _flowers. He hadn't got you roses; I thought maybe you'd like some, and maybe I could still . . . . But I got to your room and you weren't there. There was blood on the floor, and your IV, and I—I panicked. I went running down the hall, trying to find out where you were and what was happening. I don't know what happened to the flowers; I must have dropped them somewhere. And then you were in surgery again, and—and they said it had gone wrong, Donna, and you might have brain damage, and—and then your mother came and I had to tell her, and—that guy Ayres was still there, going on about Israel and telling me I'd left it too late with you and didn't have a chance any more, and—"

"I seem to remember asking for _you_ before I went under," Donna interrupted, gently. There were a lot of things she didn't remember, but she remembered that. She'd been embarrassed about seeming so needy, and had tried to turn it into a joke at first, but then. . .

"Yeah, you did. I was surprised. But I figured you just wanted a familiar face, someone you knew better than Ayres right then, to reassure you."

"I wanted _you_, Josh."

"I didn't know; I couldn't tell! You kept saying how charming he was, and treating me like—like your brother, or something—and I knew I was lucky if you still cared that much about me, after what I'd done to you, sending you there, to that place, to get hurt. I thought Ayres was right, it was too late for me. I'd never really thought you'd want me, anyway—you were always with someone else, always talking about someone else or asking me to get you a date with someone else—and I knew I didn't—I didn't—have any right to hope for anything, after what I'd done. So I just tried to be what I thought you wanted me to be. You know, just me. Just _Josh_—" and Donna recognized the exasperated way she'd so often said his name—"your pain-in-the-ass boss who almost got you killed, sending you to that God-awful place to get blown up."

And even though she'd told him she'd marry him just a few minutes before, Donna could hear the leaden weight in his voice as he remembered, and realized for the first time just how much what had happened at Gaza had added to the burden of guilt he already carried every day.

"I'm sorry!" she cried again, pulling herself even closer to him. "I'm so sorry, Josh! It wasn't your fault I got hurt; I never thought it was your fault."

"It was my fault you were there."

"You didn't know."

"It doesn't matter. I should have known."

"Oh, Josh. And I was upset with you because I thought you didn't care about me."

"Didn't _care?_" His voice cracked. "You thought I didn't _care?_ How could you think that, Donna? How could you possibly think that? I might have been a god-damned fool and a fucked-up son-of-a-bitch who sent you off to that hell on earth without ever thinking what could happen to you there, but surely you didn't think I didn't _care?_"

"That way," she amended, quickly. "I thought you didn't care that way. I thought you never would. That's why I left, Josh; I couldn't bear it. I wanted you to care that way so much. I'd always wanted that."

"Oh, Donna," he said, kissing her hair. "How could I possibly not want you that way? I've always wanted you that way. Any man in his right mind would want you that way. You have to know that. . . ."

She leaned back into him and lifted her face to his. He kissed his way down her cheek to her mouth, and they held the kiss for a very long time, neither one of them wanting to let it go. After a minute Josh brought a hand up to her breast and started to stroke it, very gently. She closed her eyes, relishing the way it felt. Then, suddenly, she remembered what it was she had meant to ask him when she'd first started this conversation.

"Josh," she said, sitting up and putting a hand on his to stop its distracting movement. "Josh, there's still something I need to ask you."

He sighed, and settled for pressing his hand to her breast instead of stroking it.

"Okay," he said, "but make it quick, Donna. The night's half gone, and there are some very important things I still need to do with my fiancée."

Donna beamed at the word, but didn't let him distract her.

"Josh," she said again, "your prescriptions—they were issued in December, last year. I looked and looked, but I couldn't find anything earlier than that, even though you still have the old ones in there—from after—" she choked a little—"after—Rosslyn. And—that Christmas. . . ."

"There weren't any to find, Donna. I didn't need them for quite a while."

"Then—why did you start to need them in November?"

Josh dropped his hand and shifted a little on the couch, uncomfortably.

"I—it was a hard time, Donna. The campaign, and the election, and Leo dying, and then the transition—you know what a state I was in for a while there. I wasn't sleeping well. I was starting to yell at people."

"That was earlier, Josh. And then you got a break from it all; we went on vacation. I thought that had helped. You seemed so much more relaxed while we were on vacation." Her vacation in paradise, Donna thought. She wondered how much it had seemed like paradise to Josh.

"I was more relaxed, Donna. It was wonderful, being there, with you, like that. Better than anything I could have imagined. But then we had to go back, and there was the job still and everything to worry about, and I thought I'd better get some help so I didn't melt down again. I went to a doctor and he gave me the prescriptions and that was that."

It made sense. It made perfect sense, really. So why did Donna feel so sure that that wasn't the whole story?

"Josh, were you having the attacks then? The chest pains? Or—" she hesitated, but she hadn't been convinced by what he'd said earlier about them, "the flashbacks?"

He scuffed at the floor with his foot.

"They're not really flashbacks, Donna. I know where I am. They're just—memories, really. Images. Vivid images. At night, mostly; they haven't been a problem at work, not even today."

So she'd been right: there _was_ more than just the chest pains. "Just" the chest pains, indeed, she thought; _just _chest pains. . . .

"I hate that you're having them at all, whatever they're like and whenever they happen. And you didn't answer my question, Josh."

"Which—was?" he asked, still scuffing with his foot on the carpet.

"Which was, when did you start having the chest pains and the—memories—

again?"

He took a deep breath, and let it out very slowly.

"Before we went away," he said, quietly.

"How long before?"

There was a long pause. His voice was even quieter when he answered. "The night before."

"Did you have them on the trip? In Barbados?"

He glanced up at her quickly, and then looked away.

"Yes," he said, very softly.

Donna flinched. Their perfect trip, their vacation in paradise.

"When?" she asked.

"I—a couple of times."

"I didn't know."

"I didn't want you to. It happened at night. I got up and went to the bathroom, or out on the balcony, and dealt with it there."

"Why was it happening?"

"I was worried about things, I guess. I have a stress disorder, Donna; I don't process stress normally. And I was pretty stressed before we went away."

"About the job?"

"Of course about the job."

"Was that all?"

Josh dropped his head, and ran his hands over his face and through his hair.

"Donna—"

"I need to know, Josh. Was that all?"

He gave a very deep sigh.

"No," he said at last. "That wasn't all."

"Was it about me?"

Josh didn't answer.

"It was, wasn't it, Josh? It was something about me."

She was sure of it; had been sure of it ever since she'd seen the dates on the prescriptions, even though her mind wouldn't seem to let her work out why.

"Something I did, before we went away. What did I do? Just tell me, _what did I do?_"

He looked up then. His face was haggard.

"I'm sorry, Donna!" he said. "I couldn't help it. I just—you said four weeks. Four weeks to get it right, or you'd go. You'd _go!_ And it was crazy at work, Leo had just—you know what that was like, and I didn't have a deputy, we didn't have a Vice-President, C.J. was freaking out on me, Goodwin was breathing down my neck, the President-Elect was listening to him more than he was to me, I couldn't get two hours together to sleep, let alone time to talk to you and find out what you were thinking! And then you said you didn't know what you wanted from this, but I had four weeks to do the right things and convince you to stay. Four weeks to figure out what you wanted and do it, so you wouldn't go. It just—it got to me, that's all. Thank God Sam forced me to take a break, and thank God you came with me, or I don't know what I'd have done. I thought my head was going to explode. I thought _I_ was going to explode, and if I had, they'd still be sweeping up little bits and pieces of me from every corner of the O.E.O.B., and think how ugly that would be."

Donna didn't smile at that, though he obviously wanted her to. Her mouth had fallen open.

"You—you thought you had to _do_ something? To keep me with you?"

He stared at her incredulously, the effort at humor gone.

"You _said,_ Donna! Four weeks. And then it was three weeks, six days—"

Donna stared back.

"I didn't mean—" she stammered. "I didn't mean—I just wanted you to decide what it meant to you. What we were doing. Whether it was just sex, or whether it meant more than that. Whether you wanted to do _this,_"—and she waved a hand around the apartment. "To really be together. That's all."

"Of course I wanted this, Donna! I asked you to stay here! You didn't want to; you said you felt awkward about it; you wanted to stay with C.J. instead. And then you said you didn't know what you wanted from this! I didn't know what I had to do to convince you to stay with me, and I couldn't see how I was going to be able to figure it out in just four weeks, with everything else that was going on."

Donna's head was spinning.

"I—I thought—you didn't know—what you wanted. I had no idea—"

"Of course I knew what I wanted! Why would I have asked you to live with me if I didn't?"

"I—I didn't think—you meant—to _live_ with you—"

"What else would I have meant, Donna? Your apartment was still sublet. I asked if you wanted to use your key and stay with me here. I didn't offer to move out. That sounds like living together to me."

"Just for a few days!"

"Jesus, Donna. I had to start somewhere, didn't I? I thought you'd stay with me and then we'd finally get a chance to talk and maybe you'd want to go on staying with me, even when that chick from Treasury did leave your place. It was the best idea I could come up with, with everything that was going on. What did you _think _I meant?"

"I—" She stopped.

What had she thought? She blushed when she remembered: that if she moved in with Josh for even a few days without a serious discussion, without a chance to lay down some rules and get his agreement to them, she'd be in trouble. That he wouldn't respect her, wouldn't take her seriously; that he'd expect her to act like his assistant again, and she'd slide into doing it because she wouldn't be able to say no to him if she let herself get in that deep. She'd been afraid he'd take advantage of her, and she'd let him. She'd been afraid they'd just go on and on like that, the way she had with Alan. . . .

"I don't know," she whispered. "I don't know what I thought you meant. I wanted us to talk, that's all—I didn't want to move in with you without talking it over first, without knowing I meant more to you than just—just—"

She stopped, and looked away.

"Than just _what,_ Donna?"

"Just _campaign sex,_" Donna answered him, desperately. "I thought we started this as just campaign sex, Josh! I needed to know it was more than that to you, that's all!"

Josh's face went very still.

"It may have been that to you," he said, quietly. "But it wasn't to me."

"It wasn't to me, either," she said, almost sobbing. "Of course it wasn't just that to me! But I didn't know it wasn't to you. How was I supposed to know that?"

Josh stared at her for a long moment.

"I thought you knew me better than that, Donna," he said softly. "I'd have thought you'd have known I wouldn't do that with you. It's been years since I've done that with anybody; when I sleep with someone, it means something to me. But you're the only woman I've ever waited eight years to do it with, and the only one I've ever asked to live with me while we were doing it."

Donna sobbed. He pulled her to him again immediately.

"Shhh," he said. "It doesn't matter now, Donna. We've figured it out; we're going to get married. Nothing else matters."

"It does," she said, through her sobs. "It does! I could _see _how stressed you were, and I didn't even think about it; all I thought about was me and getting what I wanted from you, when I wanted it. I made you sick! You had to go back on those medications, and you hate them—"

"You didn't make me sick, Donna. I was already pretty stressed-out. It was just—"

"One thing too many. The last straw."

Josh bit his lip, and she knew she was right.

"And then," she pressed on, wanting to know the worst. "Then I moved in with you. And then—oh, God, I've just realized! I gave you another deadline, didn't I? I told you I was keeping my apartment and I'd move out in six months if things weren't working out. You probably felt pressured about that, too, didn't you? And that was almost six months ago. I haven't even been thinking about it, but I'll bet you've been worrying about _that_, too, haven't you? About whether I was really going to stay or not, and what you had to do to make me want to?"

Josh looked at the floor.

"A bit," he said, uncomfortably. "Yeah. Sure. I wanted to do everything right. I just wanted you to be happy, Donna; I just really didn't want you to leave."

"So you came home every night, whether you were busy or not."

"I wanted to do that, Donna."

"You cooked dinner with me, so I wouldn't have to do it myself, whether it was late or not."

"I wanted to do that, too."

"You made love to me every night, whether you were tired or not."

"I _really _wanted to do that, Donna! More than anything. I could never be too tired to want that."

"You went to Colin's show with me, because I said I wanted you to—whether you wanted to or not."

Josh tightened his arm around her waist.

"I was proud to do that," he said, quietly. "I was proud to be there with you."

"_No matter what,_" she said. "You said you'd go _no matter what._ And you knew, didn't you? You knew what would happen. But I didn't know; I didn't even think. I just got angry with you about it, because you seemed different afterwards. You were so busy all of a sudden. You started to stay late at work. When we were making love, you seemed different—as if your heart wasn't really in it, as if you didn't really want me anymore—"

"Not _want _you!" Josh groaned. "Of course I wanted you; I always want you. I didn't know you thought that, Donna! I felt awful about those nights I couldn't; I—"

But Donna wasn't going to let him apologize for that.

"I heard you talking to your friend Lizzie there," she ploughed on, cutting him off. "I heard her say the texts I'd written were naive. She panned the show in her review the next day. I thought you probably agreed with her."

"With Lizzie? No, Donna! I was furious with her for saying that. I couldn't get away from her fast enough—"

"And she talked about how wonderful it was to be married to someone Jewish. I thought maybe you'd begun to realize what you'd be missing if you stayed with me."

"Never, Donna, never! I'd be missing so much more if I wasn't with you. I don't want a nice Jewish girl, thank you; I just want you. And for your information, my mother gave that one up years ago. She just wants me to be happy. She'll be thrilled if you'll marry me."

Donna felt a flutter of joy at that, but she couldn't let herself off the hook so easily.

"I'm just telling you what I thought, Josh. You've got to know how self-centered I've been. I've been awful. Maybe you won't want to marry me when you know; I don't deserve it."

Josh was making protesting noises, but she put her hand over his mouth to stop him and kept on.

"The _President _asked me about you—the President-Elect, I mean—he said he was worried about you, you seemed so stressed-out before we went away. And I just made a joke of it! A stupid joke. I couldn't tell him you needed a break; I couldn't tell him I was worried, too, because I wasn't. All I was thinking about was covering up what we were doing, so I wouldn't feel like a fool if it went wrong, and getting you to decide what you wanted from this on my timetable, whether that was good for you or not. All this time, ever since Gaza, everything I've been thinking has been about me. My doubts, my fears, my insecurities—"

"Donna," Josh said, taking her hand. "You shouldn't have any. You don't need to have any. But it's not self-centered if you do. You haven't been awful; you could never be awful. I should have realized you might have overheard what Lizzie was saying; I should have reassured you—"

"You were in no state to have to worry about that at all, Josh. Your doctor had to increase your dosage four weeks ago. After the show."

"Things at work—" Josh started, but his voice faltered, and he didn't go on.

"You weren't worried about work then, Josh. I know. I asked Margaret, and I asked Sam, and I talked to Lou and Annabeth one day in the Mess, and everyone said things were going well then. You know they were. That was why I got angry with you Thursday night, before you got called in."

Josh hung his head.

"I'm sorry," he said. There was a long pause. Donna watched him, shaking her head.

"You don't have anything to be sorry about," she said. "You were sick. You were sick after that show. That night, weren't you? That was one of the times you couldn't—you didn't—you made love to me, but you didn't even try to get anything for yourself, and I didn't see why. And the next day, when you kept leaving the theatre—you were sick then too, weren't you? I didn't understand; I can't believe I didn't understand. All I could think about was what your friend said, and all the things I wanted you to say to me about the show, and how you weren't saying them, and I couldn't see past myself to what was happening with you. It was because of the pictures, wasn't it? The ones of me, at Gaza, that I made you go and see?"

He nodded, looking ashamed.

"I'm sorry," he said again. "I'm sorry. They just got to me. They just—they really got to me."

"I know," she said, her voice almost a sob. "I know."

"It was—I couldn't take it, Donna. What you'd written, up on the wall—it brought it all back, sitting on that plane, reading those emails you'd written me over and over, wondering if you were still going to be alive when I got there; thinking about what those bastards had done to you, and what I'd done, sending you there; wondering if I was ever going to see you again, and what shape you were going to be in if I did. But the pictures were worse. I—I wanted to be there for you, but I just couldn't stand it; I had to leave the room a couple of times; I—I just couldn't. . . . And that night, and the next day—it was all I could think about, all I could see. And after that, I just—it just—they really got to me, Donna, they really did. I'm sorry."

She turned and put her arms around him, so she could hold him the way he was holding her, and clung to him desperately.

"I know," she said again, on a sob. "I know, Josh. I felt the same way when—when—"

She choked for a moment, then went on.

"The other day—someone—showed me—pictures—of you—at—when—you were—" She couldn't finish.

Josh stared at her, confused. Then, suddenly, he seemed to understand.

"At Rosslyn?" His eyes widened. "I didn't know there were any. I've never seen anything. There weren't any in the papers after, not with me in them, were there?"

Donna shook her head.

"Nothing," she said. "It was such a shock. I went home and was sick afterwards. And that was how I finally realized what had happened to you, after that gallery show. Though even then it took me an awfully long time to figure it out."

Josh tightened his arms around her convulsively.

"Where did you see them?" he asked, his voice rough with emotion. "Who showed them to you? They shouldn't have done that; they shouldn't have upset you like that."

"A photojournalism student was taking pictures at President Bartlet's speech. He never did anything with them—one of his profs said not to, and when he approached the White House he was told they wouldn't give permission—"

"That must have been C.J.," Josh said. "Or Toby. They never said anything to me about it."

"I guess they wouldn't. Anyway, this boy went to the exhibit in New York—to Colin's show—and that made him think maybe he could do something with them. He talked to Colin about it, and Colin told him to come to me—I guess he thought I'd persuade you to go along with it. Colin told me there was a guy who had some pictures he wanted to talk to me about, but he never said what they were. I thought they were more of me, from Gaza—"

She felt Josh shudder.

"The bastard," he said. "The absolute bastard."

"I don't think he realized how I'd feel, Josh. He deals with that kind of thing all the time, and I don't think he realized how much it would upset me, to see you like that. He thought, since I'd been okay about the ones of me, at Gaza—"

"He should never have made you look at _those_," Josh said, viciously. "You might have gotten over the worst of it by the time we got to that show, but I know they upset you; you were worried about how you were going to react in public—"

"It was okay, Josh," she said, softly. "The Congressmen, and Admiral Fitzwallace—knowing they were there, in the background—that got to me, but I didn't mind seeing myself that much, I really didn't. I didn't think about it being different for you."

"Of course it was different for me," Josh said, his face pressed into her hair. "It was _you._ If they'd been pictures of me, at Rosslyn, I'd have been fine. I don't mean I'd like it, but—"

"They were awful, Josh. Horrible. You shouldn't see them, you shouldn't ever see them; they're different than the ones of me—"

"Of course they're different. They're just me."

"Oh, Josh! I was unconscious; I don't remember it. You—your eyes were open. You—you—"

"It's okay," he said, squeezing her more tightly still. "It's okay, Donna."

"It's not okay, Josh; it's not okay! It was awful, looking at you like that, bleeding—there was so much blood—and—and conscious. Feeling it. Knowing what was happening_. _No wonder you had trouble, later. That's—that's what you go through, isn't it? Every time you have a flashback. Or whatever you want to call it, when you have these attacks at night now with the memories, the vivid memories. That's what you live through again, isn't it? Even now, after all these years—"

"No," he said, so softly against her hair that she almost missed it.

"No?"

"No."

She looked up at him, confused. He swallowed, and pulled back a bit so she could see his face. It was wrenched with exhaustion and emotion, but there was a tenderness in his eyes unlike anything she'd ever seen before.

"Not anymore," he said, softly. "That's not where I am anymore, when it happens. That's not what I see."

He ran a finger down one of her cheeks, where the blood had run in Colin's pictures, and then put his hand flat against her chest, where her scars from the surgery lay.

"Oh, Josh."

"That was worse, Donna. So much worse."

"No, Josh. Rosslyn was _much worse_ than that. I—"

"Not for me, Donna. Not for me."

oooooo


	23. Chapter 23

When they finally got to bed that night, Donna wouldn't let Josh even try to make love to her.

"Stop that," she said, pushing him gently back against the pillows. "You've been away from home for five days, getting two hours' sleep a night on a cot in the White House basement, and we've been up half the night now talking. You're exhausted. Let me rub your back, and get some sleep."

"We just got engaged, Donna. We need to celebrate. There are things I have to do with my fiancée that I've never done before," he added, incoherently.

"There's something we haven't done before?"

"There are things I haven't done with my fiancée before," he clarified. "Lots of things."

"Josh, you're so tired you can't even talk straight. I'll still be your fiancée in the morning, I promise. Get some sleep now. We're both tired. Get some sleep."

"I'm not too tired."

"You're exhausted."

"You're too tired, too?"

Donna smiled at him tenderly.

"Wiped," she said. "But in the morning. . . ."

"In the morning," Josh promised, his voice already groggy. "In th' mornin'. . . ."

Donna rubbed his back gently until he fell asleep. Then she got up and went into the living room to send a message to Helen Santos, saying she thought she'd better take another day off. The First Lady wouldn't mind, she knew. She was the most undemanding of employers, and she'd been genuinely worried about Donna before she left to see Louisa this—no, yesterday—afternoon. Besides, there was nothing so pressing on the agenda that it couldn't wait for another day: one of the advantages of working in the East Wing instead of the West.

But even Josh ought to be able to take a day off now, after the marathon of the last week. He'd mumbled as much to her as he was dropping off to sleep. Just to make sure, though, she sent an email to Margaret and another to Sam, and then turned his BlackBerry off. There was still his pager, if the President absolutely had to reach him, but she thought that was unlikely—Helen Santos had undoubtedly given orders that nothing short of a nuclear attack should be allowed to interrupt her husband's long-delayed chance to get a good night's sleep.

She was tired, but not as ready to sleep as she'd let Josh think: a kind of restlessness seemed to have taken her over, driven no doubt by all the intense and conflicting emotions she'd experienced over the last forty-eight hours, from horror and self-recrimination to giddying joy and delight. She went into the kitchen to warm up some milk and brought it back to bed with her, curling up beside Josh and sipping it slowly while she watched him sleep.

It was so good to see him sleep like that. It was what he needed more than anything else, she thought: deep, natural, uninterrupted sleep. She hoped he'd be able to get it more often now that one source of stress, at least, was gone, and he didn't have to worry about her deadlines anymore, or how to make her want to stay. Perhaps that would take enough pressure off him that these attacks would stop now. He'd always been able to manage the stress of his jobs. It was the other, more personal kinds of pressure that he found so hard to deal with. . . .

At least she'd be in a better position to look out for him now. It appalled her, to think how little she'd been doing for him all these months that they'd been living together. She'd done her share of the grocery-shopping and the cooking and the laundry, of course, and had given him the best sex she knew how to give almost every night, but she'd assumed that was all she had to do.

She'd told him, before they went away together, that they had to figure out what they wanted from each other—but she realized now that she'd never really asked him what_ he_ wanted or needed, not even when they'd had their big talk in Barbados. She'd just assumed that sex and good conversation and tolerance for his impossible work schedule were pretty much all he'd be looking for, and the idea of commitment—a deeper commitment than simply living together—was something he'd have to arrive at slowly, with considerable guidance and pressure from her before he got there. It had never occurred to her that he might have already made up his mind about that on his own, or that she might have been making him unhappy and on edge by her apparent unsureness about her feelings for him.

He hadn't told her, of course. There was so much, it turned out, that could have happened differently if only he'd told her what he was thinking—all along, from the beginning, almost. But how could she complain about that? She knew how hard emotional things were for him to talk about—harder than for most men, with his family history—and she'd never been exactly direct with him, either. She'd tried just once, but she could see now why he might not have understood her then, or why he might have been too uncertain of her meaning to do anything openly to find out.

They'd been in an impossible situation, really, working together like that—and not in an ordinary office, either, where they could have bent the rules a little to explore their personal feelings, but in the White House, where the work always had to take precedence over everything else, every minute of the day. Josh was an idealist, after all—he'd gone to work there to serve the President, and he would never have allowed himself to do anything that might interfere with that. And she'd been just as idealistic in her own way, once. It was that last year when everything had changed, when she'd gotten a taste of what it was like to have more responsibility and had started to crave it—and when she'd finally had enough of loving a man she thought was never going to love her back.

Looking at him sleeping beside her now, she wondered why she hadn't understood what he'd obviously thought she would understand when he flew all that way to be with her in the hospital in Germany. Perhaps it was just because of the pain and the drugs—there were whole parts of the experience she didn't remember clearly, and things she still wasn't sure had actually happened or not.

And yet she'd known he was there, and had realized that he'd left the White House at a critical time to be with her. She'd told herself it must be because Leo had thought someone should be there and had sent him. Her mother had shaken her head in despair and told her over and over again that Leo McGarry would hardly have sent his right-hand man to her at a time like that if the right-hand man hadn't wanted very badly to come, and that a man didn't do that sort of thing unless he really loved someone, but she hadn't wanted to listen to her mother. Instead she'd listened to C.J., an unmarried woman in her forties who had been quite bitter at the time about the state of her own relationships with men; and Kate Harper, three times divorced; and Louisa D'Amato.

Most of all to Louisa. If only she hadn't. . . . And yet she couldn't altogether blame Louisa, who had only been doing her job as she saw it, and had only had the information Donna gave her to work with all along.

Donna wondered if there were other kinds of therapists who might be more perceptive about what their clients weren't telling them, or who took a broader view and might try to remind their clients sometimes that their own needs weren't the only ones they ought to be considering. There must be, she supposed—there were people who specialized in couples therapy and family therapy, which could hardly be practiced by emphasizing one person's needs at the expense of another's. Perhaps that was the kind of therapist she should have sought out, someone who might have been able to remind her that Josh was not just a difficult boss but a human being with reasons for acting the way he did, and issues and needs of his own.

But she hadn't wanted to be reminded of that; she'd wanted someone to talk to about the traumatic experience she'd been through, and after that she'd wanted a sympathetic ear to complain to about how badly Josh was treating her and how frustrated she was in her job.

Or perhaps she should simply have listened to her mother, who had had no patience with that kind of talk, and had been relentless in trying to get Donna to look at Josh in a more sympathetic light. But that had been at least half the reason why Donna had refused to.

Thinking about it now, she felt ashamed of herself. Did other women in their mid-thirties still have issues with their mothers? When their mothers were as good and kind and loving as Donna, when she wasn't in a bad mood, had always admitted hers to be? She loved her mother hugely, and knew without a shadow of a doubt that her mother loved her. So why was it so hard, sometimes, to talk to her? And why, when her mother wanted to give her advice, was it an almost-automatic response to do the opposite of whatever she was urging? Goodness, Donna thought, I'm like a teenager still, rebelling and trying to prove that I can do things on my own.

It was a depressing realization; she wanted to be able to think of herself as more mature than that. And of course, most of the time she _was _more mature than that. It was just when her mother tried to direct the really important decisions of her life that Donna found herself digging her heels in and wanting to prove her wrong.

But her mother hadn't been wrong this time; she'd been absolutely right. And Donna could only rejoice that she had been, because after all, Josh had been in love with her all this time—ever since Gaza, and long before that—and nothing could make Donna happier than knowing that. She'd call her mother tomorrow and tell her, and her mother would laugh and cry and say, 'I told you so,' and Donna knew that she'd laugh and cry too, and say, "Yes, Mom, you really did. I should have listened to you," and her mother would say, "Yes, darling, you should always listen to your mother, but at least you finally did this time." And Donna would have to bite her tongue to stop herself just in time from saying that it was Josh she'd finally listened to, not her mother at all. . . .

It had taken her a long time, but she'd finally listened—to what he wasn't saying, what he needed to say. It was all she'd needed to hear. He loved her, and wanted her to be happy with him; he didn't want her ever to leave. She wondered why it had taken her so long to hear that, when he'd been saying it in every way he could except with words, and when she'd always known that words were something Josh didn't find it easy to come up with when his deepest, most personal feelings were involved. But she'd been listening to herself—her wants, her needs, her insecurities and fears—more than she had to him.

Still, she'd finally heard what he'd been trying to tell her all this time, and she'd told him what he'd so badly needed to hear, and now there really was a chance that they could be happy together, as long as they kept talking, and kept listening to each other more than to themselves. Not that she was going to accuse Josh of doing that. He'd been listening to her, all right; he could hardly be blamed for not realizing that she hadn't been saying what she really meant. But she'd said it now, and she'd make sure she said it again and again, often: she loved him, and his happiness mattered more to her than anything else in the world.

She looked down at him, and felt a rush of such tenderness that it almost overwhelmed her. He was so far from perfect, this man, and yet she loved him with everything in her, and she knew, when she really thought about it as she was now, that she loved him for his imperfections as much as for any of his obvious strengths. She loved the strength of his arms and legs, of course, and the beautiful lines of his body and face, but she loved the receding hairline and the creases in his forehead, too, the little lines that age was starting to draw around his mouth, and the flecks of grey that were just beginning to show in his thick curls. She loved the acuity of his mind and the strength of his conviction in his own abilities, even when it drove her to distraction, but just as much she loved the hesitations and self-doubt that she knew were always there under the surface, because they were a measure of how much he cared about everything he was doing, and how much it mattered to him to do it right.

He wasn't really an egotist, she knew, though when she was irritated with him it was sometimes hard to remember that: he was a man of passions and convictions who had long ago decided to throw the whole strength of his being into trying to make the world a better place and to do it no matter what the cost to himself, and she loved that about him desperately, even though it worried her desperately for his sake, too. She loved his humor and his seriousness; his love of life and his struggles when living it was almost too hard; his wonderful smile, and the dark look that could shadow his eyes when he was afraid of failing at one of the impossible demands he had placed on himself, or when someone else had failed and he didn't know how to make things right.

She loved the qualities in him that completed her own and made her feel stronger and safer, more intelligent and more vividly alive, but she also loved his weaknesses and his vulnerabilities, because they were what made him need her. And she knew now that he _did_ need her, just as much as she needed him. That was a humbling and almost frightening thing, to think that she really did have that kind of importance in his life, after all these years of doubting it—but it gave her a feeling of wonderful warmth and strength and peacefulness and joy, as well. She hoped he could feel the same way, now that he knew how much she loved and needed him, too.

She looked around the room, and smiled. It was cramped—much more cramped now than it used to be, with all her things jammed in next to Josh's—and distressingly untidy; she'd been too miserable for the past few days to make any effort to pick up after either of them, and Josh had left in too much of a rush on Friday morning to pick up after himself. The bedroom door was standing open. She'd left a lamp on in the living room; by its light she could see Josh's t-shirt hanging off the exercise bike, his backpack dumped beside the door. Her shoes were tumbled together by the sofa, and the contents of her purse spilled over the coffee-table; the table and the desk were both covered with the papers she'd been looking at, and stacks of files and other papers were perched with coffee-cups and magazines and bits and bobs of clothing on the t.v. and bookshelves and every other dusty surface she could see.

The kitchen was just as bad, she knew, and the bathroom—after her wild search for Josh's medicines earlier—even worse. The apartment was small and crowded and a mess, but it looked more beautiful to her right now than the grandest house on Embassy Row, more beautiful even than that lovely and frighteningly expensive resort Josh had paid for in Barbados that had seemed like paradise to her just a few months ago. This wasn't paradise. It was better than that. It was real; it was theirs; and it was home.

It was all she wanted. She'd have to be sure to tell him that tomorrow: that none of those other things he'd been worrying about—proposals in fancy restaurants, and expensive rings and weddings and honeymoons and houses—really mattered to her at all, as long as she had this—Josh, and a place together that they could call home. And children some day, of course. And yes, children would need a larger house and good schools to go to, if she and Josh could possibly manage it. But all of that could wait. For now, this was more than good enough. It was real. It was theirs. And it was home.

oooooo

Daylight was flooding the room when, hours later, she woke to find him kissing her. His eyes were warm and bright as they watched her; his usually brilliant smile almost shy.

"Do you still want to marry me?" he asked, wonderingly.

"If you still want to marry me," she answered softly, letting her mouth melt into his.

They made love for a long time then, and after a while she found herself losing all consciousness of any difference between her pleasure and his, or between herself and him at all.

oooooo

The End


End file.
